230182 The Syntax of Farsi (S) (WiSe 2025/2026)

This course explores the morpho-syntactic structures of Farsi, an Indo-Iranian language (within the Indo-European family) spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Our data in this course will be from colloquial language spoken in Iran-Tehran. Farsi features a rich morphological system with a wide range of productive affixes used to form new words and grammatical constructions. It’s verbal inflection is a good example of such system, in which a single-complex verb expresses an entire sentence (e.g., [did-am-et] ‘saw-I-you’, meaning I saw you). This morphological richness also contributes to flexible word order patterns, which we will examine in this course.

Students will learn how to analyze the structure of language in different linguistic aspects and compare it to other languages in the same or different family.