Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian

NOTE EDITORE

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book draws on a detailed corpus analysis of fifth-century historiographical texts to explore the influence of the Iranian languages on the syntax of Armenian. While contact between the Iranian languages - particularly Parthian - and Armenian has been a fertile field of research for several decades, its effects on syntax have to date been somewhat neglected. Here, Robin Meyer argues that the Armenian periphrastic perfect construction with its unusual morphosyntactic alignment was created on the model of similar constructions in Parthian, along with a number of other syntagms. Unlike previous accounts, the language contact model presented in this book can explain all the idiosyncrasies of the construction, as well as its diachronic developments. The study also offers new insights into the historical social dynamics between Armenian and Parthian speakers, and suggests that the Parthians, who were the ruling class in the Armenian Kingdom for almost four centuries, eventually abandoned their native language.

SOMMARIO

1 - Introduction2 - Linguistic evidence for Iranian influence on Armenian3 - Socio-historical evidence for Iranian influence on Armenian4 - Morphosyntactic alignment5 - The syntax of the Armenian perfect: A corpus analysis6 - Other cases of Iranian-Armenian pattern replication7 - Parthian-Armenian language contact and its historical context8 - Conclusions

AUTORE

Robin Meyer has been Assistant Professor in Historical Linguistics at the University of Lausanne since 2020. He completed his doctorate on language contact between West Middle Iranian and Classical Armenian at Oxford in 2017, following which he held the positions of Diebold Research Associate in Comparative Philology and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Since 2019 he has also been a member of the Council of the Philological Society.

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780198851097
• Collana: Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
• Dimensioni: 240 x 25.0 x 165 mm Ø 656 gr
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Pagine Arabe: 336