The official establishment of the first Department of Linguistics at Tehran University in the 1970s gave an academic prestige to this field of Humanities and made it an attractive discipline for many scholars who had not even heard of it before. At the outset, the research agenda of this department was mainly directed toward historical studies. However, upon the return of some pioneering linguists such as the late Hormoz Milanian, Mohammad-Reza Bat eni, and Ali-Ashraf Sadeqi from Europe, this general tendency began to change and a strong theoretical tradition was gradually established. Since then, with the advent of the second and third generations of linguists who were educated in Iran and abroad, and also due to the flourishing and expansion of departments of linguistics elsewhere in the country, descriptive and theoretical analysis of Persian language along with other Iranian languages has become a recurring theme for graduate research, leading to masters and doctoral dissertations. Several papers derived from these dissertations have also been published in various academic journals worldwide. This picture will be much wider if we also take into account those studies which have been conducted on various characteristics of Persian by Iranian or non-Iranian scholars in Europe and North America. In the face of these achievements, no single volume has yet been devoted to introducing different characteristics of Persian language and other Iranian languages and their related linguistic investigations. The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics can, therefore, be regarded as the first attempt to deliver a compact overview of Persian language and various aspects of its linguistic tradition in one single volume for both specialist and non-specialist audiences. In addition to its immediate advantages for Persian linguistics in general, this volume can also pave the way, and be simultaneously used as a model, for similar projects on other (less studied) Iranian languages.
Apart from its comprehensive introduction written by the editors, this volume contains six thematic parts and nineteen chapters. With the exception of the first and fifth parts, including two and four chapters respectively, all the other sections contain three chapters. In general, the editors have tried to identify and elaborate on the hallmarks of Persian linguistics through introducing the promising achievements, reviewing the prominent and ongoing debates, and suggesting possible lines of investigation for further research in the future. In so doing, they have invited the leading scholars of the main sub-disciplines of Persian linguistics to cooperate with the project either by compiling the related chapters or by reviewing the written materials.
The first part of this volume, which contains two chapters, is generally devoted to the history of the Persian language and its typological classification. Starting with the main features of Persian language in its Old, Middle, and New periods, the authors of the first chapter of this section, Mauro Maggi and Paola Orsatti, concentrate on changes that have taken place in the structure of Persian in its long journey from past to present. In the first part of the second chapter, Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam attempts to highlight the morphosyntactic features of Persian, like its agreement patterns and alignment system from a typological viewpoint. He maintains that the mixed typological behavior of Persian in its three historical stages have provided a unique research opportunity which is worth pursuing. In the second half of the chapter in question, Dabir-Moghaddam sheds light on the characteristics of some other dialects of Persian like Tajiki, and Afghani.
Phonetic and phonological analysis of Persian constitutes the topic of the second thematic part. In an attempt to unravel the intricacies of Persian sound system in the first chapter of this part, Golnaz Modarresi Ghavami introduces the phoneme inventory of Persian and discusses various auditory and acoustic properties of its phonemes. Moreover, this chapter contains an informative discussion of the historical comparison of the sound system of modern Persian with that of early New Persian. In the second chapter, Mahmood Bijankhan provides a comprehensive account of the phonology of “Tehrani” Persian, discussing its syllable structure and investigating its phonological processes from the perspective of generative phonology and optimality theory. A section of this chapter is also allotted to the detailed analysis of some attested phonotactic constraints in Persian which sharply violate Sonority Hierarchy. This part concludes with a final chapter on Persian prosody by Arsalan Kahnemuyipour. He tries to explain different levels of the Persian prosodic system and its relationship with information structure, phonetic realization, and intonation patterns.
The third part of this volume, which contains three chapters, deals with the syntactic properties of Persian. A general overview of the available literature on Persian linguistics demonstrates that a remarkable proportion of the studies conducted on Persian is related to its syntax. The editors, therefore, must have had a challenging task summarizing this extensive body of literature in one single section. The outcome is brilliant. In the first chapter of this part, Simin Karimi tries to comprehensively shed light on the underlying properties of certain syntactic phenomena from the perspective of a minimalist program. Some of the issues which are discussed in this chapter like complex predicates, ezafe constructions, and differential object marking have been extensively analyzed in the available literature on Persian syntax over the past decades while some other topics like complex DPs, resultative constructions, modality, and negation are among less studied issues which need careful attention in the future. The second chapter of this part covers a number of theoretical approaches to Persian syntax. Jila Ghomeshi starts her discussion in this chapter with an extensive introduction on what differentiates theoretical approaches from purely descriptive ones, and then she continues to analyze non-generative theoretical frameworks such as linguistic typology, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics, functional grammar, and corpus linguistics along with their application to Persian syntax. The chapter concludes with brief coverage of some non-minimalist formal approaches to Persian. The final chapter of this section, by Pollet Samvelian, is devoted to the detailed analysis of three specific phenomena in Persian syntax, namely ezāfeh construction, differential object marking, and complex predicates. The author of this chapter has chosen these syntactic issues mostly because she believes that the comprehensive treatment of the language-specific peculiarities of these issues can lead to significant cross-linguistic results.
In the first chapter of the fourth section, which is generally allotted to the morphology of Persian, Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the morphological system of Persian. In doing so, he first introduces the Persian morphemes along with their basic properties and then focuses on compounding and other word formation processes in Persian. Lexicography in Persian constitutes the topic of the second chapter. After providing a general survey of the history of lexicography for Persian language, Seyed Mostafa Assi discusses the current state of affairs and the recent advances which have taken place in the field of lexicography. Tremendous growth of corpus-based frameworks and latest improvements in theoretical and applied approaches to linguistics are among the main factors which the author refers to as accounting for the recent achievements in Persian dialectology. Mohammad Dabir-Moghaddam concludes the current section on Persian morphology with a chapter on the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. The general atmosphere which justified the necessity of having a language academy for Persian in the first Pahlavi era, the eighty-year history of the academy, and a general evaluation of its achievements are among the main themes of this chapter.
The fifth section of Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics is mainly concerned with sociolinguistics and the investigations which have been carried out on teaching Persian to non-Persians. Yahya Modarresi has devoted the first chapter of this section to a general sketch of sociolinguistic investigations in Persian-speaking areas, especially Iran. After dividing this chapter into two parts, the author tries to deal with the general issues of Persian sociolinguistics like dialect studies in the first part and keeps the second part for thorough analysis of some large-scale topics such as social variations in Persian, ongoing changes, and the process of standardization. In the second chapter, Shahrzad Mahootian elaborates on a very significant aspect of Persian sociolinguistics, namely language contact and multilingualism. When the author completes her description of societal bilingualism along with the main reasons for its emergence in the first part of the current chapter, she turns to the concept of identity and its relationship with language in multilingual contexts in Iran. The third and final chapter of this section considers the phenomenon of “Heritage Language.” Since Heritage Languages is a comparatively new discipline in Persian sociolinguistics, Anousha Sedighi’s chapter on this notion and its implementation in Persian could be appealing to readers. The last chapter of this section, by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and Anousha Sedighi, covers the general issues and challenges of teaching Persian to speakers of other languages. In addition to providing a historical account of the tradition of teaching Persian to non-Persians, the authors have sought to shed light on the current state of the art through reviewing some recent second-language acquisition studies on Persian.
Psycholinguistic investigations in Persian and general aspects of the application of computational methods on Persian are discussed in the sixth section of the volume. The first chapter, written by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, is allocated to a general review of psycholinguistic investigations of Persian. This branch of Persian linguistics is relatively young, however, as the author of this chapter maintains this field is witnessing a growing body of literature which is mainly focused on mental lexicon, language processing, and language impairment. The second chapter of this section is compiled by Reza Nilipour on neurolinguistics. The author provides a comprehensive summary of some of the pioneering works in the field of Persian neurolinguistics. These studies are based on data gathered from both brain-damaged and healthy speakers of Persian. This section, and the whole volume, concludes with a chapter on computational linguistics and its implementation in Persian by Karine Megerdoomian. At the outset, the author introduces some basic notions like computational modelling of linguistic representation, Natural Language Processing (NLP), which are overwhelmingly employed in the field of computational linguistics (CL). The basic challenges of the practical implementation of the methods of CL and NLP in Persian language are subsequently discussed in the other parts of the chapter. The author finishes with a review of the current state of computational studies in Persian and some proposals for conducting more research in this vein in the future.
There are two crucial points which are observed in all parts of this volume and are worth mentioning. First, the editors have not deliberately tried to homogenize the technical nomenclature used throughout this volume. In other words, instead of being encouraged to employ a fixed set of terms in their argumentations, authors have been at liberty to utilize their own choices of terms. This fact gives the audience a chance to gain familiarity with a wide range of technical terms employed in the existing literature on Persian linguistics. Second, the discussions and argumentations of each chapter are convincingly augmented by sets of useful and authentic data. Not only do these data make the proposed accounts more comprehensible, but also they could inspire the researchers to bring alternative explanations for the attested phenomena. Generally speaking, the Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics provides a reliable and reader-friendly source for those researchers who wish to gain familiarity with Persian language and its various characteristics and the scholars who have been working on Persian and want to update their assumptions and get helpful research proposals.
