Copyright

Roohollah Mofidi; Hiwa Asadpour;

Published On

2026-01-07

Page Range

pp. 199–232

Language

  • English

Print Length

34 pages

4. A Contact-Induced Structural Change with a Lexcial-Functional Asymmetry

A Passive Construction in Nayini

Chapter of: Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond(pp. 199–232)
This chapter discusses passive constructions in Nayini, a Central Iranian language, focusing on three distinct patterns. It identifies the contact-induced aspects of passive formations influenced by Persian, including the importation of Persian participial forms and the imposition of its syntactic features, which exhibits an asymmetry between the parts of the passive construction. The chapter also suggests that an existing Nayini change-of-state construction has contributed to the examined contact-induced change by providing a structural ground for it.

Contributors

Roohollah Mofidi

(author)
Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at Imam Khomeini International University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9966-0580

(PhD, Tarbiat Modares University, 2011) is Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department of Imam Khomeini International University. Currently, he is investigating the agreement system of Nayini within the CRC 1252 project entitled Prominence in Language at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on event structure and its determinants in Persian as well as the diachronic development of aspect and mood markers in Persian from the third century onwards, from a typological and a usage-based perspective. He has also worked on a diachronic dataset of New Persian (10th–20th centuries). He has experience gathering fieldwork data for Nayini (in 2022 and 2024) and has supervised fieldwork projects documenting other Iranian languages.

Hiwa Asadpour

(author)
Research Fellow at the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe University Frankfurt
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7074-2435

(PhD, Goethe University Frankfurt, 2021) is a Research Fellow at the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at the Goethe University Frankfurt (JQYA), where he explores interdisciplinary applications of his linguistic research. He specialises in comparative and corpus-based linguistic analysis of Iranian and non-Iranian languages, with a focus on morphosyntax. His current research examines language production mechanisms in Kurdish varieties, Persian, Armenian, Neo-Aramaic, and Azeri-Turkic, integrating natural language corpus data (both fieldwork and published sources) with experimental results. He is actively involved in the development of treebanks for several Kurdish varieties within the Universal Dependencies framework, and is supervising the development of treebanks for other low-resource Iranian languages at Saarland University.