Agnes Korn (CNRS, UMR Mondes iranien et indien, Paris, France)

• Isoglosses and subdivisions of Iranian

     The aim of this seminar is to look at some problems of the traditional subdivisions of Iranian and at possible ways for a new approach. In the first part, I will summarize the problems in data and method with the traditional model of relations among the Ir. languages. In the second part, I will discuss which alternative models might seem possible to account for the relations within Iranian.

• Some points of historical morphology of Iranian

     In this seminar, I will give a short overview of some major developments and trends in the nominal and verbal system of Iranian, from Old Iranian to the contemporary languages.

Armin Hoenen (the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Crawling the web for resources in Low Resource Languages of Western Asia

     The objective of this course is two-fold. Firstly, during the course, we will thoroughly try to compile a corpus for your favorite Western Asian language. As a source, we will use the largest corpus available, the internet. Compare famous corpus linguist A. Kilgarriff’s 2001 paper with G. Grefenstette: Web as corpus. You will learn about tools, methods and common problems especially in connection with low resource languages, such as the semi-automatic or automatic exclusion of documents in a close sister language or dialect or the identification of menus and other unwanted content or of documents including code switching. Tools will include language identification, transliteration and web crawling tools as well as an introduction to search engines. But, just like secret services, we will investigate the human element, too in order to optimize our strategies, meaning that the likeliness of finding content depends on human factors such as the interest of the users of the internet in the respective language communities. Other general tendencies of which kinds of content first appear when the internet reaches considerable amounts of people of a new speech community, such as a will for preservation of folklore, will be analyzed. Finally, you will get to know the largest corpora and archives for language material and learn about their advantages and disadvantages.

     The second objective apart from building your corpus is to familiarize you with current tools, methods and caveats - enough to develop an ability to realistically estimate the expectable amounts of desired results and the proportion of handwork involved.

     Finally, legal issues and Copyright will round up the course. Participants should bring their own computers and be ready and willing to work with the internet and to install some new programs.

Bahman Rostami-Tabar (Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK)

Range of methods using R software

     This workshop covers a range of methods often used in qualitative and quantitative research in social science using R software tool. In this workshop, we are going to use R through an interface called R Studio which facilitates an enhanced user experience. The workshop aims to introduce participants to ways in which R can be used to conduct a range of common quantitative and qualitative analyses. The focus is on how to conduct analyses in R rather than on qualitative or quantitative approaches themselves. Assuming basic knowledge of statistics, quantitative and qualitative researches, participants will learn:

• How to use R for exploring data, manipulating data and visualizing data
• How to analyze text, patterns, audio formats
• How to carry out statistical evaluations of data

This workshop is for you if you:

• Wish to learn to use R,
• Want to expand your knowledge of data analysis generally.
• Wish to develop skills in using R.

Prerequisites (no prior knowledge of R is assumed):

• Some experience in data analysis and have taken introductory statistics.

Bernhard Koehler (the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

• Basic word order typology

     This lecture will discuss possible basic word orders and their typological implications in the languages of the world. First, the basic word order, i.e. the “dominant” relative position of subject, verb and object in a sentence, will be defined and it will be shown that it can be difficult to determine the basic word order of a given language. Following studies by Greenberg and others, some structural properties such as head-initial vs. head-final features will be demonstrated to be related to certain word order types. Lastly, it will not be forgotten that the syntax of sentences in a language may change under different circumstances like focalization of a constituent and that the basic word order itself can change over time due to internal developments or language contact.

• Complex sentences, including converbs, other subordinate verb forms, syntax of various kinds of phrases etc.

     Starting from issues of basic word order, this lecture will investigate which kinds of words or phrases can additionally enter a sentence and in which positions. It will become clear that adverbials and adpositional phrases tend to be less restricted syntactically than subject, verb and object. More emphasis, however, will be laid on different types of subordination under a main verb, also on those which are best rendered by a full-fledged subordinate clause in many languages. Illustrations will come, for example, from converb constructions and serial verb constructions, two kinds of structures which are typical of certain areas of the world. The conclusion should be that the complexity of sentences may be principally unlimited.

Cécile Meier (the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

• Problems in defining definiteness (with respect to English)

     Expressions like proper names, pronouns, demonstratives and definite descriptions usually count as the standard examples for definite expressions. What are their uses? What makes them definite? We will look at standard examples and tests (from the theoretical literature) that help determine the uses.   I will argue that definite descriptions (expressions with the article "the") seem to have the widest use of all expressions that count as definite.

• Types of semantic analysis for definite descriptions

     Semantic theories for definite descriptions typically aim at explaining one use (putting aside the others). The question whether definite descriptions are more like quantifiers like "every N" or whether they are more like pronouns or more like proper names or demonstratives or whether they are a category of their own and how they relate to indefinite expressions.

• Linguistic Variation in expressing definiteness

     Discussion: Implications for Kurdish, Armenian, Aramaic, Turkish, Azeri Turkic, Arabic, Georgian, Persian etc. How is definiteness marked?

Daniel Krauße (the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

An overview of morphosyntax in Eastern Armenian

     As the official language of the Republic of Armenia and with many speakers in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic as well as smaller communities in Georgia and in Iran, Eastern Armenian is an important language in the Caucasus with regard to language contact and language change. Due to Armenia’s history, many loanwords from neighboring languages have also found their way into Modern Eastern Armenian. Some of those loanwords will be offered during the presentation.

     The workshop is designed to give a brief overview of the morphology and the syntax of Eastern Armenian based on basic sentences, sentence structure taught in schoolbooks, basic interrogative clauses, echo questions , and complex imperative clauses using the Eastern Armenian National Corpus (EANC) and an interview with native speakers. The audience will be given an annotated text of Eastern Armenian and we will discuss the scope of negation and the particle ēl (usually translated as “also”) based on the text given.

Hélène Gérardin (INALCO Paris-UMR 7192, France)

An overview of morphosyntax in Georgian

     The workshop aims at presenting the main grammatical features of Georgian (Kartvelian language, spoken in the Caucasus) in a typological perspective: phonology, morphology and syntax. The focus will be on the verbal morphosyntax. Owing to its large number of verbal features and the close connection between morphosyntax and semantics, Georgian offers excellent data for the study of general concepts such as transitivity and valency.

Hiwa Asadpour (the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

An overview of morphosyntax in Mukri Sorani

     In this workshop, students will learn about the morphosyntax of Sorani Mukri through the available corpora. The corpus includes folklore and oral data collected form Mukri region in northwest Iran. The objective of this workshop is to give a typology of Sorani Mukri to the participants. Sorani Mukri is in contact with several other language varieties including Azeri Turkic, Neo-Aramaic and Armenian and there is also contact with dialects in Kurdistan region of north Iraq. The students will have text, translation and they also will try to do annotation tasks in order to get to know the language structure better. No prior knowledge is required. In the next workshop, we will discuss field work and data collection. Participants will be familiar with different methods of data collection in order to study language contact and detecting areal features, contact-induced and convergence based on Sorani Mukri and Urmia Kurmanji data.

Murad Suleymanov (EPHE Paris-UMR 7192, France)

An overview of morphosyntax of Azeri

     This workshop will introduce essential features of Azeri morphosyntax through the study of an authentic corpus. The corpus will include folklore and oral data (mostly from the variety of the Republic of Azerbaijan with some texts also in the Azeri variety of Iran) arranged in the order of difficulty. The objective of the workshop is to initiate the participants into the typology of Azeri, which is a major contact language in the Caucasus and the Near East where it was once used as a lingua franca. Short exercises or translations will also be set. No prior knowledge is required, although basic training in Turkish is an asset.

Nicolaos Neocleous (University of Cambridge, UK)

Word Order and Information Structure in Romeyka: Continuity, Contact and Change

     Language change is by definition “a failure in the transmission across time of linguistic features” (Kroch 2001: 699). Such failures, in principle, could occur within groups of adult native speakers of a language, while failures of transmission seem to occur in the course of language acquisition. One actuating force for syntactic change, whose existence cannot be doubted, is language contact. However, it is difficult to apply an appropriate contact model to analyze syntactic changes in a language. Withal, it is a challenge to define the earlier linguistic form of a language against the changes which have been induced by language contact since (i) quite often, for earlier linguistic forms, evidence is not always available; (ii) internal forces always seem to be at work (hence no ab ovo contact-induced syntactic change). Thus, the reconstruction of the origins of contact-induced changes in a language has to overcome these theoretical and methodological problems.

     In Asia Minor Greek, it is clear that significant syntactic changes have occurred. Since Dawkins (1916), there has been a tendency for scholars to assume that any change in Asia Minor Greek must be due to the influence of the politically dominant external language that is Turkish (Matras 2009: 250; Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 215-222; Thomason 2001: 63-64, 66-67; Winford 2003: 83-84; 2005: 402-409). This, presumably, is why Thomason and Kaufman assign Asia Minor Greek as “an excellent example of heavy borrowing –category 5” (Thomason & Kaufman 2001: 215), arguing that it arose via massive grammatical borrowing.

     However, a close examination of the candidate features for contact casts doubt on this claim (see Karatsareas 2011). For instance consider the changes in headedness that occurred in Cappadocian Greek (see Neocleous & Sitaridou in prep.). Cappadocian in particular was influenced far more heavily than those in areas like Silli and Pharasa, while Pontic Greek displayed even less influence. Turkish influence on Cappadocian Greek was pervasive, encompassing the lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax. In syntax, Cappadocian Greek is a head-final language. Thus, it surfaces a possessed-possessor order, a complement-adverb order and a dependent verbal form–main verb order. Previous research has overwhelmingly treated this development as a contact-induced change that resulted from the influence of Turkish OV word order (Dawkins 1916: 200-202; Janse 2009: 48-52). Nevertheless, OV word order is also attested in Hellenistic Greek, which is the ancestor of Asia Minor Greek (see Kirk 2012). Subsequently, language continuity cannot a priori be dismissed as a contributing factor that may have favored OV word order in Asia Minor Greek.

     Against this background, the aim of my lecture is to present a diachronic account of the developments affecting word order in Romeyka, an archaic variety of Pontic Greek dialect, which however is currently spoken by Muslim communities in the north-east Black Sea and therefore is in constant contact with Turkish (see Sitaridou 2013, 2014a/b). I specifically focus on linguistic mechanisms and processes that resulted in change or continuity of said parameter. Following a systematic diachronic examination, I investigate (a) whether Romeyka is OV or VO underlyingly; and if the former is a result of information structure (see Sitaridou & Kaltsa 2014); or rather we are dealing with split-headedness; (b) whether the developments in headedness in Romeyka can be shown to be internally or externally-induced; (c) in my approach, I reassess the role of language continuity and attempt to model language contact by examining the triggers for the developments in headedness in Romeyka.

Thomas Jügel (Labex EFL, Inalco, Paris, France)

• The development of the ergative construction in Iranian languages

     Ergativity is one of the hot topics of typological linguistics. The differing patterns of semantic roles and their morphosyntactic representation challenge the universal definition of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Iranian languages represent a famous example of so-called split-ergative languages (ergativity only appears with past stem formations). Their long attestation (more than 2.500 years) allows us to have a close look on the various stages of ergativity in time. We will see how a change in the tense-aspect system caused the genesis of ergativity and how further changes in case marking and agreement led to a renovation of accusative alignment, a process that continues in some languages up to today.

     After an introduction to basic terminology, we will focus on ergativity of the Iranian type and analyze examples from various Iranian languages of the Old, Middle, and New Iranian stages

• The history of enclitic pronouns in Iranian languages

     Enclitic pronouns are the oblique counterpart of free or orthotone pronouns in Iranian languages. As such they fulfil an important role in the case system and they are one of the few indicators of ergativity in several Iranian languages. Their placement restriction has given rise to peculiar syntactic patterns like the “placeholder construction” or “topic agreement”. The latter was reanalysed as verbal agreement in some languages so that the former ergative construction turned into an accusative one. West Iranian languages show differing stages of development with respect to enclitic pronouns being used as agreement markers. An areal peculiarity is that North-eastern Neo-Aramaic shows a pattern very similar to Kurdish, which suggests strong Iranian influence on this Semitic dialect group.

     The phenomenon of pronouns being used as agreement markers is an interesting example for the ongoing discussion in typological linguistics about the nature of agreement and pronominal reference.