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49
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Introduction
I am a linguist interested (mainly) in the study of syntactic alternations from a cross-linguistic point of view. In my PhD I studied word order variations in Persian using corpus and experimental data. I have also worked on word order variations in French, Armenian and Kurdish with various colleague. I am currently working in a project led by Dr. Eva van Lier and based in Amsterdam on the role of lexical restrictions in morpho-syntactic alternations: https://lexicalrestrictions.com
Additional affiliations
January 2021 - present
January 2020 - December 2020
Position
- PostDoc Position
Description
- Labex "Empirical Foundations of Linguistics" (EFL) - https://en.labex-efl.fr/ Strand 3: Typology and dynamics of linguistic systems
April 2017 - January 2020
Education
December 2010 - December 2016
June 2008 - August 2010
October 2005 - August 2008
Publications
Publications (49)
The aim of this paper is to tease apart two available views of the VP in Persian. The prevailing view of the Persian VP initially suggested in generative
studies assumes a hierarchical structure with two object positions, mainly motivated by the existence of differential object marking in Persian.
Building on quantitative studies, we revisit this h...
Persian Complex Predicates (CPs) have been a focus of interest during the last two decades. Their formation (i.e. morphological/lexical vs. phrasal/syntactic) and their interpretation (compositional vs. idiomatic) have been thoroughly inves-tigated and various analyses have been proposed to account for their seemingly contradictory properties. In t...
The “long-before-short” (LbS) preference observed in SOV languages, e.g. Japanese, Persian and Basque, challenges the universality of availability-based theories of word order preferences supported by incremental models of speech production, put forward to account for the “end-weight” preference observed namely in German and English. Based on data...
In a most recent corpus study on Persian, Faghiri & Samvelian (2014)found a significant effect of relative length in the ordering preferences between the direct and indirect objects in the preverbal domain corresponding to "long-before-short". They furthermore showed that the position of the direct object mainly depends on its degree of determinati...
Studies on constituent ordering have pointed out the tendency to post-pose heavy constituents. However, head-final languages seem to dis-play the mirror-image tendency. In this paper, we present corpus data on the relative order between the direct object (DO) and the indirect object (IO) in Persian, an SOV language. Our study shows a similar effect...
This study presents new data on the bi-absolutive construction in Chechen, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken in the northern Caucasus. The basic case frame in a transitive clause in Chechen is ergative-absolutive. In progressive constructions with an auxiliary and a simultaneous converb, the basic case frame alternates with an absolutive-absoluti...
Talk at the workshop """Consequences of the OV-to-VO change on different levels of clause structure", organised by Katalin É. Kiss (Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics)
This paper empirically tests the embedding constraints on gapping in Persian. It has been suggested that gapping differs from other kinds of ellipsis in banning embedding. However, the first counter-examples in the literature come from Persian. Following up on previous experiments on embedded gapping in several languages, we report the results of t...
This study addresses the issue of unmarked word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA), typologically considered an (S)OV flexible language due to its being strongly left-branching as well as due to the syntactic properties of its VP (focus, bare objects, low adverbs). However, Armenian grammars generally consider (S)VO to be the canonical order. T...
In this paper, we discuss some issues related to the kind of data typically used in syntactic research. We first propose a critical view of grammaticality judgments, traditionally employed in formal syntax, by highlighting their variability and their gradient dimension. We then present different methodological aspects of quantitative and experiment...
Acceptability rating questionnaires are a highly accessible tool for the experimental study of different syntactic phenomena, however, for the study of word order preferences, they are not as efficient as sentence production experiments. In this paper, we present a constrained sentence production task implemented via web-based self-administrated qu...
This paper presents a corpus-based description of cleft constructions in Persian showing that they display more diversity and complexity than currently described in the literature. Previous studies have only focused on constructions that echo one of the three main classes of clefts (IT-clefts, pseudoclefts and reversed pseudoclefts), and generally...
This paper addresses the issue of separability in Persian complex predicates (CPs). These are syntactic combinations formed by a verb and a preverbal element (noun, adjective, preposition) realizing a single conceptual unit. Although the separability of the components of a CP by morphological and grammaticalized elements (ex. auxiliaries) is not a...
This paper discusses the animosity against Arabic elements of Persian in present-day Iran, and argues that this phenomenon can be seen as a continuation of the modern anti-Arabism that appeared in Iran in the 19th century as a direct result of the domination of European culture, rooted in European racial thought and linguistic beliefs and ideologie...
The discipline of linguistics in general, and the field of African linguistics in particular, appear to be facing a paradigm shift. There is a strong movement away from established methodologies and theoretical approaches, especially structural linguistics and generativism, and a broad move towards critical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and lingui...
Heaviness (or phrasal length) has been shown to trigger mirror-image constituent ordering preferences in head-initial and head-final languages (heavy-late vs. heavy-first). These preferences are commonly attributed to a general cognitive pressure for processing efficiency obtained by minimizing the overall head-dependents linear distance-measured a...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the question of the ‘canonical’ or ‘unmarked’ word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA), which is broadly considered a (flexible) SOV language. In theoretical syntax studies, the SVO order is generally assumed to be marked, resulting from a right dislocation. There are however typological studies and a...
The canonical word order in ditransitive sentences constitutes an essential argument in the development of the prevailing existing analyses of the VP in Persian, an SOV language with flexible word order and Differential Object Marking. Adopting a quantitative approach to word order variations, FAGHIRI & SAMEVELIAN (2014) and FAGHIRI et al. (2014) h...
Dans le domaine postverbal, l’ordre des compléments du verbe est relativement libre (Paul donnera un livre à chacun / Paul donnera à chacun un livre). Nous cherchons à déterminer quels sont les facteurs qui influencent le choix d’un ordre par rapport à l’autre. Nous nous intéressons en particulier à deux facteurs : le poids grammatical et l’accessi...
La recherche en syntaxe a une longue tradition méthodologique reposant sur le recours
aux jugements de grammaticalité. Cette méthode de recherche a permis des avancées
considérables, mais se trouve limitée quand il s’agit d’étudier des phénomènes où les
jugements sont variables et sensibles au contexte, par exemple dans le cas de variations
syntaxi...
The aim of this paper is to tease apart two available views of the VP in Persian. The prevailing view of the Persian VP initially suggested in generative studies assumes a hierarchical structure with two object positions, mainly motivated by the existence of differential object marking in Persian. Building on quantitative studies, we revisit this h...
This thesis proposes a quantitative study of word order variations in Persian, focusing on the relative order between the direct object (DO) and the indirect object (IO). The latter plays a crucial role in the theoretical analyses of the VP, which in the absence of quantitative studies lack solid empirical underpinning. My first goal is to contribu...
In this paper, we present a usage-based study to constituent ordering in Persian in line with studies on word order variations that take into account functional factors. The results of our empirical study, combining corpus-based and experimental data, goes against the widespread theoretical view of Persian’s phrase structure. More precisely, our re...
Several theoretical studies (e.g. Browning & Karimi 1994; Karimi 2003; Ghomeshi 1997; Ganjavi 2007) claim that rā-marked (definite and/or specific) direct objects (DOs) occupy a higher position than their non-rā-marked (indefinite non-specific) counterparts. One of the main arguments to support this claim is the unmarked relative order between the...
In a most recent corpus study on Persian, Faghiri & Samvelian (2014) found a significant effect of relative length in the ordering preferences between the direct and indirect objects in the preverbal domain corresponding to "long-before-short". They furthermore showed that the position of the direct object mainly depends on its degree of determinat...
هدف این مقاله بررسی دادهبنیاد توالی مفعول مستقیم و غیرمستقیم در ساختهای دومفعولی با ترتیب فاعل-مفعول-فعلدر فارسی است. محققان در حوزة نحو، عمدتاً در چهارچوب نظری زایشی، برای مفعول مستقیم قائل به وجود دو جایگاه نحوی متفاوت بسته به مشخص بودن آن یا به عبارت دیگر، همراهی آن با حرف نشانة را هستند (کریمی۲۰۰۳؛ راسخمهند ۱۳۸۳). در این راستا، پیرو پژوهش ها...
In this paper, we address the issue of compositionality of Persian complex predicates. We argue against the “radical” or “fully” compositional views prevailing in the studies within the generative framework. We further show that any a priori compositional account of Persian complex predicates is doomed to failure, since the respective contribution...
This paper introduces PersPred, the first manually elaborated syntactic and seman-tic database for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs). Beside their theoretical interest, Per-sian CPs constitute an important challenge in Persian lexicography and for NLP. The first delivery, PersPred 1 1 , contains 700 CPs, for which 22 fields of lexical, syntactic and...
Résumé. Dans cet article nous présentons une nouvelle version de PerLex, lexique morphologique du persan, une version corrigée et partiellement réannotée du corpus étiqueté BijanKhan (BijanKhan, 2004) et MElt fa , un nouvel étiqueteur morphosyntaxique librement disponible pour le persan. Après avoir développé une première version de PerLex (Sagot &...
We present a new version of PerLex, the morphological lexicon for the Persian language, a cor- rected and partially re-annotated version of the BijanKhan corpus (BijanKhan, 2004) and MEltfa, a new freely available POS-tagger for the Persian language. After PerLex's first version (Sagot & Walther, 2010), we propose an improved version of our morphol...
This thesis presents a word-based study of what is generally called the nominal plural morphology of Persian (Tehrani dialect) within the framework of the Whole Word Morphology developed by Ford & Singh (1991). This lexicaliste model takes up a stronger position than that proposed by Aronoff (1976) and Anderson (1992), by not allowing any morpholog...
Projects
Projects (4)
This project combines typological, corpus-linguistic, and psycholinguistic methods to study argument structure alternations. We focus on so-called alternating verbs: verbs whose arguments can be coded in more than one way, hence requiring speakers to choose between grammatical constructions. According to usage-based theory, verb-argument constructions are not formed by abstract, grammatical rules operating on the entire verbal lexicon, but rather emerge from speakers’ experience with specific verbs in communicative context. In typology, however, such verb-specific grammatical structures have mostly been treated as exceptions. Yet, corpus studies and psycholinguistic priming experiments show the ubiquity of verb-specific patterns in language use. By combining diverse languages and using various methods, we hope to shed light on the factors conditioning different types of argument structure alternations, and especially on the role of verb-specific knowledge.
The question of whether the ‘unmarked’ or ‘canonical’ word order in Modern Eastern Armenian (MEA) is (S)OV or (S)VO is a matter of controversy. The aim of this project is to investigate this question via quantitative methods.
Understanding word order universals related to "grammatical weight" by investigating similarities and divergences of weight-based ordering patterns in VO and OV languages.
To what extend “heavy-first” and “heavy-last” are valid typological generalizations?
What is the relevant typological grouping: head-final/right-branching languages vs. head-initial/left-branching languages or OV/preverbal domain vs. VO/post-verbal domain (independent of the head-direction parameter)?
Are there other typological or language-specific parameters involved in determining weight-based effects?
