Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Year:2019 | Volume:7 | Issue:26 |Papers Count:7

This research studies the Extended Projection Principle and explains the status of subject construction in the sentences of Avestan, Old, and Middle Persian based on the Generative Grammar. The results show that the Extended Projection Principle feature in those languages is strong and the tense functional head after valuation of the case feature on the noun phrase in the specifier of little verb phrase and receiving the proper valuation for its phi-feature from the same noun phrase, should have a noun phrase in its specifier based on the Extended Projection Principle. In those languages, the subject cannot remain in the specifier of the little verb phrase and should move to upper functional head due to the strength of the Extended Projection Principle. This study shows that the unmarked word order in the embedded sentences of those languages is subject-object-verb order but in the matrix sentences, the constructions can move to other positions based on the scrambling.

In this article, the authors have studied the phenomenon of hiatus of vowels and some approaches to resolve it in central Kurdish through descriptive-analytical method and have analyzed collected data in the framework of optimality theory. Analyzing the data which consists of about 80 simple, morphological, and compound words, shows that the most commonly used method used by central Kurdish speakers for this purpose is the glide formation process. In addition to glide formation, the vowel deletion process is only used in cases where two short vowels are located in the vicinity, due to the unauthorized glide formation-out of the open vowels. The analysis of the collected data for this study, based on the principles governing optimal phonological theory, shows that in central Kurdish, because there is no syllable without an onset the hiatus is not permitted and speakers of central Kurdish use glide formation and deletion processes to resolve hiatus of vowels. Finally, the constraints governing glide formation are determined as * OCP "IDENT-F (ROUND)" IDENT and the restrictions governing deletion are set to * OCP, GF (+ LOW), M. MAX "IDENT and Ranked.

The current study aims at investigating the manifestations of lenition in Ilami dialect of Kurdish based on optimality theory. The study was conducted in a descriptive-analytical method and the data were collected through a survey while recording the daily speech of speakers living in Ilam and were finally analyzed according to the linguistic intuition of one of the writers as a native speaker of the dialect studied. The analysis of the data shows that the vocalization of [b, d, g] is applied respectively through the processes of consonant approximation, deletion of stem vowel, deletion of prefix vowel, and finally conversion of the consonant into a vowel. Moreover, it has been revealed that vocalization is applied only in morphophonemic environments and in phonemic ones only the first process, namely consonant approximation, is applied. The findings also show that in explaining those processes having phonemic alternations and applied in several passes, serial model is of more efficacy than the parallel one since the former depicts the intermediate levels and the morphophonemic developments of the words in a step-to-step manner.

Persian singular and plural reflexive/ emphatic pronouns are formed by adding enclitic pronouns to the word “  od” (self). This research analyzes and compares the pronunciation of reflexive pronouns in the standard spoken Persian and Bakhtiari dialect using Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). It aimed at introducing (un)shared phonological processes and constraints that determine the pronunciation of singular and plural reflexive pronouns. In so doing, it came up with inclusive rankings of constraints to explain all different pronunciations in both versions. The results of this research indicate that pre-nasal raising in plural reflexive/ emphatic pronouns is the only shared phonological process in the standard spoken Persian and Bakhtiari dialect. Furtheremore, the principal reason for different pronunciation of reflexive pronouns in Bakhtiari dialect is deletion of /d/ in “  od” which in turn feeds the deletion of enclitic vowel in order to resolve hiatus. Also, this paper discusses why the consonant of the enclitic /-aS/ is pronounced either [S] or [s] in different Bakhtiari speaking areas. As for Bakhtiari dialect, the analyses are rather diachronic because changes in the pronunciation of its reflexive pronouns have occurred throughout its history and today they have no other pronunciations.

The aim of this research is to analyze total reduplication of verbs in Persian. Reduplication in Persian is divided into total and partial reduplication. One kind of total reduplication is the repetition of the word made by be + present verb root. The base word can be an adjective, a noun or an adverb. When these words are reduplicated, they will make new words that are different from base in form, meaning or usage or all of them. So, they can be regarded as constructions that in comparison to the base have a different pair of form and meaning. What we mean by construction is construction in the sense suggested in Construction Grammar and Construction Morphology of Booij (2010). Two questions of the research are: 1-How can we call these kinds of reduplication a construction? 2-Are there any common characteristics among them to have a schema for them? The data is gathered from Persian Linguistics Database of Mostafa Aasi, Soxan Dictionary (2002), Persian texts and conversations by people. The method of the research is descriptive-analytic.

The aim of this research is to study Persian discourse markers in Azerbaijani speakers’ speech. Data was collected from Azerbaijani speakers’ conversations over 18 hours in Ardabil. Investigating data shows that Persian discourse markers, " xob, be hǝ r hal, yǝ ni, vǝ li, belǝ xǝ re, ǝ slǝ n, vaqeǝ n, kolǝ n, vallah, mǝ sǝ lǝ n, xolase, be xatere, ǝ lbǝ te, be qoli, ǝ ma˒ dǝ rhalike˒ bǝ d˒ ҫ ö n˒ dǝ qiqǝ n˒ dǝ rvaqe are used in Azerbaijani conversations. They take place in different positions in a sentence with various discourse functions. The reasons of these substitutions are multifunctionality, lack of equivalents and simplicity of Persian discourse markers. Data analysis based on linguistic and non-linguistic criteria of borrowing/code-switching differentiation shows that the majority of Persian discourse markers have been borrowed by Azerbaijani and some of them appear as code-switched elements in bilinguals’ speech. The findings are in line with Myers-Scotton’ s view describing borrowing/code-switching continuum as a mechanism for accomplishment of borrowing process.