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The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics

This panel show-cases the articles of a comprehensive edited volume on Persian linguistics entitled: The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics, published by Oxford University Press. The volume offers a state of the art and detailed overview of different fields of Persian linguistics, discusses their development, and captures critical accounts of cutting edge research within the major subfields of Persian linguistics. The handbook also discusses current debates/problems and suggests productive lines of future research. The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics is designed as a resource for scholars and their advanced students as well as those researching in related areas. Chapters are authored by internationally renowned leading scholars in the major subfields. Nevertheless, the volume is aimed to maintain accessibility to those outside the immediate specialization of the authors so that the book can also be informative for non-specialist readers. The Handbook of Persian Linguistics, in one volume, gives critical expression to the Persian language. The outline of the book is as follows: the first section focuses on Classification and History of Persian language and contains the following articles: Persian as part of the Iranian Languages, History of Persian Language, and Typological Approaches and Dialects. Section Two focuses on the sound system of the Persian language and includes the following articles: Phonetics, Phonology, and Prosodic Structure. Section Three focuses on Morphology and Syntax and includes the following articles, Morphology, Syntax (Overview), Syntax (Theoretical Approaches), and Specific Features of Persian Syntax. Section Four focuses on Semantics and Pragmatics and includes the following contributions: Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, Lexicography. Section Five focuses on Sociolinguistics and Language Identity and includes the following articles: Sociolinguistics, Bilingualism, Persian as a Heritage Language, and the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. The last section focuses on other areas of study such as Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguisitcs, Computational Linguistics, and Persian Language pedagogy. As such, The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics is a significant and ground-breaking contribution to the field of Persian linguistics as a whole. In the current panel, three articles from different sections of this volume will be presented and discussed. The first presentation focuses on the Specific Features of Persian Language, the second presentation discusses the cutting edge work on Persian psycholinguistics, and the last presentation explores and examines the new and emerging field of Persian as a Heritage Language.

Presentations

Persian as a Heritage Language
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This paper discusses the phenomenon of “Heritage Language” as a whole with a specific focus on Persian as a heritage language. Studying heritage languages is a relatively new and emerging field, which has flourished within the past several decades and as migration and globalization grows, heritage languages are becoming more and more important. The first part of this study provides an original contribution by unifying the existing research on Persian as a heritage language. This is a crucial and timely task because while Persian as a heritage language is relatively a new field, various researchers have already explored this topic from the linguistic, sociological, anthropological, and language policy perspectives. However, many scholars are not aware of the existing research, which causes them to start the work from the ground up. This paper offers a solid foundation by providing a comprehensive overview of the literature on Persian as a heritage language and can be used as a resource for future scholars. The second part of this study builds on the previous work and examines various characteristics of heritage Persian speakers in terms of their linguistic and metalinguistic abilities, compares their profiles with that of a native speaker and a second language learner, and sheds light on the current challenges within this field. Findings of this study have important implications for educators, curriculum developers, and policy makers.

Persian Psycholinguistics
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Psycholinguistics, which embeds psychology and linguistics, is interested in how we process language. Its tenet is how word meaning, sentence meaning and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. The whole process is, however, an automatic unconscious one.
Psycholinguistics, as its name suggests, encompasses psychology of the language as well as the linguistic psychology. Although they might sound similar, they are actually distinct. The first one is a branch of linguistics, while the latter is a subdivision of psychology.
In psychology of the language, the means are the research tools adopted from psychology and the end is the study of the language. However, in the linguistic psychology, the means are the data driven from linguistic studies and the end is psychology.
What I will focus on in this paper is the first one; that is, psychology of the language. The goal of this paper is to give a state of the art perspective on the small but growing body of research using psycholinguistic tools to study Persian with a focus on two areas: a) presenting long standing debates about the mental lexicon, language impairments and language processing, and b) introducing a source of data for linguistic analysis of Persian. In this paper, I will present the definition of the mental lexicon and then the methods used in psycholinguistic research. Later, I will include the few existing studies on psycholinguistics in Persian, as this subdivision of linguistics is quite understudied in less studied languages, such as Persian.

Specific Features of the Persian Syntax : The Ezāfe Construction, Differential Object Marking, Complex Predicates
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Three aspects of Persian syntax have received a great deal of attention for more than 30 years: a) the Ezāfe construction; b) differential object marking with the enclitic =rā; c) complex predicates. The reason for this persistent interest is the way each of these phenomena involves both language specific empirical facts, which need to be accurately described and accounted for, and cross-linguistic issues for which the Persian data can be of a crucial interest. The Ezāfe construction, a specific feature of the noun phrase in many Western Iranian languages, sheds a new light on the way dependency relationships, i.e. complementation vs. modification, are realized within the NP and the morphological correlates of these relationships with respect to head vs. dependent marking patterns. It also contributes to the debate on the nature of linkers in a variety of languages. Differential object marking, realized by the enclitic =rā, clearly highlights the way specificity and definiteness are related to topicality, since in colloquial Persian =rā also endorses a topic marker function, reviving thus its ties with its functions in Middle and Classical Persian. Finally, complex predicates (compounds verbs or light verb constructions), which constitute the main device of verbal lexeme formation in Persian, raise the issue of how syntactic and morphological lexeme formation resemble and diverge at the same time and shed a new light on the manner idiomaticity and compositionality can cohabit.
In this talk I will, I will address the issue of how studies on these three specific features of Persian have contributed to more general theoretical debates in formal linguistics and language typology.