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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. 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 INTRODUCTION 3 (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?"): 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 4 CJL/RCL 46(1/2), 2001 (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.
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