Introduction

Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 46(1/2): 1-7, 2001

Introduction

JILA GHOMESHI University of Manitoba

This special issue contains four articles on Persian and one on Pashto— two languages belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Persian is the official language of Iran and is spoken in several neigh bouring countries. Pashto is spoken primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both languages are very robust: Pashto with at least nineteen million speakers, Per sian with at least twenty four million speakers (source: SIL's Ethnologue at www. ethnologue. com). There are many lesser-known and virtually unstud ied Iranian languages spoken in and around Iran (Gilaki, Kurdi, Mazanderani, Lori, Baluchi)—so many in fact that this collection might be more aptly named: The syntax of Iranian languages beginning with "p". Ideally, there will come a time when there is enough ongoing research on these other languages that a special issue such as this one can live up to its title. Persian does not yet have indisputable membership in the class of Iranian languages beginning with "p", even though the name has been used for centuries in the West. There has arisen some confusion in the last twenty or thirty years as to whether Farsi—the Persian name for Persian—is a preferable name for the language. Among certain non-Iranians there may be an assumption that the Persian name for the language is "post-colonial" and therefore superior. These may be the same people who enjoy Iranian films which most newspapers inform us are "in Farsi" and subtitled in English. However, the confusion does not exist among non-Iranians alone. Among the wave of Iranians who have settled in North America since 1979, a sizeable number refer to their native language as Farsi. Since it has been the practice of most linguists publishing in North America to refer to the language as Persian, I will briefly mention three reasons, culled from a variety of sources, for why this may be the case. First, there is not necessarily anything "colonial" about referring to a language by an English name, viz. French notfrangais and German not Deutsch. Second, the name Farsi plays into local nationalistic sentiments as it refers only to dialects of Persian spoken in Iran and not to the Persian spoken in Tajikistan, renamed Tajikfl

'Spooner (1994) actually claims that the name became "tojikf when the Soviet au thorities changed the alphabet from Perso-Arabic to Cyrillic. However, Tajiki remains the more common rendering of this name in English.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 01 Oct 2021 at 01:54:06, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100017904 2 CJIVRCL 46(1/2), 2001

in 1928 or the Persian spoken in Afghanistan, renamed Dari in 1964 (Spooner 1994). That these three "languages" are historically the same and remain mutually intelligible may be, from a linguistic point of view, something worth reinforcing through our naming practices. Third, the name Farsi robs the language of its cultural associations and its past—it is a name that cannot evoke an empire, mysticism, poetry, carpets and cats. These points are made in more detail in Spooner (1994) while comments weighing in on both sides can be found in the on-line archives of The Iranian (www. iranian. com).2 Turning now to syntax, the articles in this collection are all situated, theoreti cally, within the Minimalist Program of Chomksy (1995) and its kin. Each article addresses questions that in one way or another pick out some of the more salient features of the two languages. Rather than focussing on the analyses, I will briefly outline the phenomena discussed in this collection as a way of introducing some of the more intriguing properties of these languages in general. In some cases there is a substantial amount of existing literature on the topic. I will not attempt to give a literature review here as citations to the relevant work are given in each article. Persian is a language with relatively free word order, which is thought to be the result of scrambling. That is, in a simple transitive clause the default or neutral word order is SOV but other orders are possible as shown in (1). (1) a. SOV Kimea ketab-o xund. Kimea book-OM read.PAST.3SG 'Kimea read the book.' b. OSV Ketab-o Kimea xund. book-OM Kimea read.PAST.3sG 'Kimea read the book.' c. OVS Ketab-o xund Kimea. book-OM read.PAST.3sG Kimea 'Kimea read the book.' d. SVO Kimea xund ketab-o. Kimea read.PAST.3SG book-OM 'Kimea read the book.' The sentences in (lb-d) all differ slightly in terms of topic/focus and given/new information (not reflected in the translations). Given this freedom of movement or re-ordering, it is surprising to find that the position of w/i-expressions is relatively fixed. A wft-object, for example, does not usually appear at the left edge of a sentence but most naturally remains in the same (default) position as its non-w/z- counterpart. Thus Persian appears to be a vWi-in-situ language: 2I would like to thank Tanmoy Bhattacharya for providing me with this reference.

(2) a. SOV Kimea 5i xund? Kimea what read.PAST.3sG 'What did Kimea read?' b. OSV *Ci Kimea xund? what Kimea read.PAST.3SG If all languages fall neatly into one of two categories, those with w/i-movement and those without, then examples such as (2) suggest that Persian belongs to the latter category. It turns out, however, that w/i-expressions do not always stay in situ in Persian. Kahnemuyipour ("On w/i-questions in Persian") shows that w/i-expressions corresponding to post-verbal adjuncts, for instance, must appear preverbally: (3) a. jEliba msryaem ezdevaj=kaerd [Con dust-e5=da§t]. Ali with Maryam marry=do.PAST.3SG [because friend-3SG.CL=have.PAST.3SG] 'Ali married Maryam because he loved her.' b. JEli [£era] ba maeryam ezdevaj=kasrd. Ali [why] with Maryam marry=do.PAST.3SG 'Why did Ali marry Maryam?' c. *jEli ba maerysm ezdevaj=ka?rd [Cera]. Ali with Maryam marry=do.PAST.3SG [why] The behaviour of w/i-expressions in Persian casts doubt on the idea that all lan guages can be characterized as one of two types — with or without w/i-movement. Most generative syntacticians have assumed that w/j-movement is feature- driven movement. To take one instantiation of this idea, we can assume there is a [+wh] feature in Comp that attracts words bearing a matching feature. In this way we can explain why, in English, a w/i-question must always have an initial w/i-expression. Extending this idea to other instances of movement is challenging, however. The nature of the features involved in scrambling, for example, is far less obvious. These features often do not seem related to meaning at the level of the sentence but must take a larger discourse context into account. Problems for a feature-driven view also arise when movement is optional, as it often is with certain stylistic re-arrangements of sentences. A language with both optional scrambling and limited-but-obligatory w/i-movement, therefore, requires a very careful investigation into the kinds of features that trigger movement. The issue of movement and discontinuous dependencies also arises when we consider noun phrases involving complement or relative clauses in Persian. While argument noun phrases appear preverbally (in a discourse-neutral context) their clausal complements or modifiers can appear equally easily after the verb. Con sider the following example from Karimi ("Persian complex DPs: How mysterious are they?"):

(4) a. Maen [un ketab-i-ro [ke Sepide diruz xaerid]] I that book-REL-OM that Sepide yesterday buy.PAST.3sG be Kimea dad-aem. to Kimea give.PAST-lSG 'I gave the book that Sepide bought yesterday to Kimea.' b. Maen [un ketab-i-ro ] be Kimea dad-aem. I that book-REL-OM to Kimea give.PAST-lSG [ke Sepide diruz xaerid], that Sepide yesterday buy.PAST.3SG 'I gave the book that Sepide bought yesterday to Kimea.' Again, we can ask whether this is an instance of feature-driven movement and whether it is related to scrambling or w/i-movement in the language. In addition to the optional discontinuity of complex DPs, Karimi notes that in object position they can appear with the object marker -ra following the head noun or following the whole DP. Thus (5) is an alternative to (4a). (5) Maen [un ketab-i [ke Sepide diruz xaerid]]-ro I that book-REL that Sepide yesterday buy.PAST.3SG-OM be Kimea dad-aem. to Kimea give.PAST-lSG 'I gave the book that Sepide bought yesterday to Kimea.' The placement of this morpheme, along with the freedom with which relative and complement clauses can be separated from the nouns they modify, suggests that complex DPs may constitute a different kind of constituent from their English equivalents. The variable position of -ra is reminiscent of another kind of optionality that has been noted with respect to clitic morphology in Persian, specifically the interaction between object clitics and complex predicates. Persian has a very large and open class of complex predicates in which a preverbal element (e.g., noun, adjective, adverb) appears with a verb to form a single predicate. Examples from Megerdoomian ("Event structure and complex predicates in Persian") are given in (6). (6) a. baz=kaerdaen open=do 'open' b. 5ena=kaerdasn swim=do 'swim' c. fekr=kaerdxn thought=do 'think' d. ab=kaerdaen water=do 'melt'

Object clitics, which usually follow subject agreement on simple verbs, preferably appear on the preverbal element of complex predicates: (7) a. Maen dar-o baz=kaerd-35m. I door-OM open=do.PAST-lSG 'I opened the door.' b. ?Masn baz=kaerd-aem-es\ I open=do.PAST-lSG-3SG.CL 'I opened it.' c. Maen baz-e5=kaerd-aem. I open-3sG.CL=do.PAST-lSG. 'I opened it.' This morphological fact is only problematic if complex predicates are considered to be single "words", and, in fact, there is evidence that they should be so considered from stress placement, nominalizations, and adjectival formation. Complicating matters, there are also other syntactic and morphological processes that treat complex predicates as syntactically transparent. Indeed the problem may be on the insistence that there be a clean split between the lexicon (word formation) and syntax (sentence formation). Complex predicates in Persian have inspired much research not only because of their morphological properties but also because of their argument structure and aspectual properties. Regardless of the facts they wish to explain, most researchers looking at complex predicates have been led to explore the lexicon-syntax interface and the division of labour between the two. Turning to a phenomenon that is usually taken to be purely syntactic, namely, subject agreement, Persian seldom employs non-finite verbs, that is, verbs that lack agreement morphology.3 Consequently, the Persian equivalents of non-finite embedded clauses in English contain fully inflected verbs, as shown in (8a), and even unambiguously mono-clausal constructions can contain two finite verbs, as shown in (8b), taken from Ghomeshi ("Control and thematic agreement"). (8) a. Maen mi-xa-m be-r-aem. I DUR-want-1 SG SBJ-go-1SG 'I want to go.' b. Maendar-asm mi-r-aem. I have-1 SG DUR-go-1 SG 'I'm going.' If subject agreement is taken to be the manifestation of a structural relationship between a verb and an argument, then there must be a syntactic argument for each verb that bears agreement morphology. In the case of a clause containing an auxiliary verb and main verb that both bear agreement, this means that there must be more than one subject, or at least more than one subject position per clause.

3I am using the traditional definition of "non-finite forms" here, see Palmer (1986:114).

Alternatively, agreement cannot be viewed as purely syntactic. In either case, certain traditional ideas about subjects and agreement are called into question. Verbal agreement is more complicated in Pashto than in Persian. Pashto is an ergative language in which the verbal agreement identifies the subject in non-past tenses and the object in the past tense. In addition to verbal agreement there exists a set of pronominal enclitics that appear in second position and can refer to any argument (other than dative) not identified by the agreement on the verb. Beyond these two constraints, their construal seems to be surprisingly free. Clitics can be construed as subjects, objects, and even possessors depending on the tense and agreement on the verb. Roberts ("Deriving second position") gives the following example to illustrate the kind of ambiguity that a single clause with two pronominal clitics can engender: (9) Topak mee dee raaworr-e. gun (MASC) 1SG 2SG brought-MASC.3sG i. 'I brought your gun.' ii. 'You brought my gun.' This is an added wrinkle to the questions that second position clitics raise in general. The issues touched upon above, such as the nature of the properties that drive movement and alternate word orders; the syntax of clitics; the correspondence between words, agreement, and syntactic structure; are general enough to be ones that most syntactians have grappled with in one language family or another. It is not surprising that our understanding of the mechanisms that underlie all languages may be advanced by the study of particular languages—regardless of which ones they are—though it is good to be periodically reminded of this fact. In late May 2001 the contributors to this special issue who work on Persian, along with two other linguists living in North America and working on Persian, Vida Samiian and Golnaz Modarresi Ghavami, went to Iran to participate in two workshops. The trip was part of an ongoing attempt to bridge two communities with common goals that, at the moment, practically exist in a state of forced isolation from each other. For linguists living and working in Iran, attending international conferences, for example, is prohibitively expensive if travel is per mitted at all. Even membership fees to societies such as the LSA are out of range. Access to North American and European research materials (e.g., books, theses, working papers, conference proceedings) is difficult. For those interested in Iranian languages in North America there are few, if any, English-language journals or conferences devoted exclusively to Iranian linguistics. That this is related to global politics is supported by the fact that such journals, conferences, and workshops exist for language families that comprise a much smaller number of speakers world-wide. Despite these sorts of obstacles, there is a remarkable amount of common ground we share with our colleagues in Iran and the level of enthusiasm about linguistics among the Iranian students is inspiring. As an Iranian, I am grateful to be part of an academic community in which the goal of

advancing knowledge is stronger than nationalist and political considerations. As a Canadian, I am proud to have contributed to a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics that reflects this fact.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Palmer, Frank R. 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spooner, Brian. 1994. Are we teaching Persian? or farsi? or dari? or tojiki? In Persian studies in North America: Studies in honor of Mohammad Ali Jazayery, ed. Mehdi Marashi, 175-189. Bethesda, Maryland: Iranbooks.