Trends in Iranian and Persian Linguistics (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [Tilsm])

"This set of essays highlights the state of the art in the linguistics of Iranian languages. The contributions span the full range of linguistic inquiry, including pragmatics, syntax, semantics, phonology/phonetics, lexicography, historical linguistics and poetics and covering a wide set of Iranian languages including Persian, Balochi, Kurdish and Ossetian. This book will engage both the active scholar in the field as well as linguists from other fields seeking to assess the latest developments in Iranian linguistics."-- Publisher's website Acknowledgments 6 Table of contents 8 Introduction 10 1 The alleged Persian-Germanic connection: A remarkable chapter in the study of Persian from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries 1 14 2 Huihuiguan zazi: A New Persian glossary compiled in Ming China 34 3 Glimpses of Balochi lexicography: Some iconyms for the landscape and their motivation 66 4 On some Iranian secret vocabularies, as evidenced by a fourteenth-century Persian manuscript 82 5 Specialization of an ancient object marker in the New Persian of the fifteenth century 1 94 6 Fillers, emphasizers, and other adjuncts in spoken Dari and Pashto 114 7 The historically unmotivated majhul vowel as a significant areal dialectological feature 132 8 Variability in Persian forms of address as represented in the works of Iranian playwrights 148 9 Some linguistic indicators of sociocultural formality in Persian 176 10 Spoken vs. written Persian: Is Persian diglossic? 196 11 Accounting for *yek ta in Persian 226 12 The associative plural and related constructions in Persian 246 13 Revisiting the status of -eš in Persian 1 276 14 ‘Difficult’ and ‘easy’ in Ossetic 290 15 Possessive construction in Kurdish 310 16 To bring the distant near: On deixis in Iranian oral literature 322 17 Extracting semantic similarity from Persian texts 352 List of contributors 376 Index 378 The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The series considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems