I’m a lecturer of Persian language in the department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at
the University of Toronto. I received my Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona in 2006. My major interest in linguistics is syntax (grammar), morphology (word formation) and semantics (meaning) of Persian. My research focuses on Persian verbal system, especially the interaction of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Negation. I have presented conference papers on Persian possession, Persian impersonal constructions, subjunctive morphology, mood and modality, clausal arguments in Persian complex predicates and agreement morphology. In the last five years, I had this opportunity to teach Persian as a second language. This experience led me to start a new project on the acquisition of Modals and Negation by Persian Heritage Students and Second Language Learners. My recent publications include: Tense, Aspect, modality and Negation in Persian (forth coming, John Benjamins), Mood and Modality in Persian, appear in a monograph of Iranian Aspects of Linguistics by Cambridge Scholars Press, Wh-Movement, Interpretation, and Optionality in Persian, Working with Simin Karimi as a Co-author, in Simin Karimi, Vida Samiian & Karen Zagona (Eds). Phrasal and Clausal Architecture: Syntactic derivation and interpretation. John Benjamins.

Persian Linguistics in 20th Century

Abstract

Linguistics is a new field among social and human sciences which is developed in 20th century.  In the last 50 years, linguistic research has gone beyond the scientific study of the internal structure of a language and overlapped with other fields like neurology, psychology, computer sciences, sociology, and made new interdisciplinary fields such as neuro-linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics.  Although it is less than a century that linguistics has been known as a new science, its development was remarkable.  Different research and investigations on Indo-European and non-Indo European languages had a great role in the development of this new field.  This paper focuses on the development of Persian linguistics in 20th century with emphasis on grammar and word formation. The discussion of this paper shows how the development of general Linguistics affects the study of Persian grammar and grammar writing in 20th century. In this discussion, first I present a brief overview of the history of the study of grammar in Iran.  Then I discuss different linguistics trends in Persian linguistics in recent decades diachronically and synchronically.  Finally, I conclude the paper with contemporary situation of Persian linguistics.