چکیده:
This article describes word order in Persian and selected Iranian languages. Although Persian is
mainly recognized as an SOV language, the article shows that out of twenty criteria utilized in Dryer
(1992) to distinguish OV languages from VO languages, in two third of them this language behaves
like a verb medial language. The study will account for the dual behaviour of the language by
providing a historical review of its word order status from Old Persian to New Persian and will draw
theoretical implications. It will then analyze word order in selected Iranian languages.
Key words: Word order status in Persian and selected Iranian languages.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Persian compared with languages of the world (View the image of this page) Key: I.
allem ast he teacher is 'He is a teacher' (8) u mi-xah-ad ke be-rav-ad he indicative-want-he that subjunctive-go-he 'He wants to go' (9) zan-e rnehraban woman-genitive kind 'A kind woman' (10) an zan that woman 'That woman' (11) besyar bozorg very big 'Very big' (12) na-raft-am not-went-I 'I didn't go' (13) xah-arn raft will-I go 'I will go' (14) aya u raft-¢ Q he went-he 'Did he go'!' (15) hengami ke u raft-¢ when that he went-he 'when he went' ('16) ketab-i honk-a 'A hook' (17) minii amad-4> Mina came-she 'Mina came' (18) do ketab two hook 'Two books' (19) dav-id-arn run-past-I 'I ran' (20) kctab-am book-my 'My book' With respect to Table 1, two points are noteworthy: (a) Persian contains a single posiposiuon (and a large number of prepositions), i.
Two hypotheses may be raised to account for the split behaviour of Persian with respect to the word order correlation: (i) Persian is in the process of a syntactic change from an OV type to a VO type.
(ii) Persian is basically a free word-order language.
Tu assess the first hypothesis, the word order status of Old Persian (OP), spoken between sixth to third B.
In contemporary Persian, which is also analytic, we notice that the language has become more configurational by fixing the noun+ genitive order reducing th~ number of postpositions to a single one (i.
Tables 4 and 5 represent the word order status of Gilaki and Kurdishrespectively.