Competing Subordinating Strategies in East Iranic Pamir Languages

The research will address the seemingly inconsistent system of clause-linking subordinating strategies in the understudied East Iranic Pamir languages, minority languages in the countries where they are spoken, and will provide a typology of the strategies that syntactically and/or functionally correspond to subordination.

This will be achieved by defining unambiguous parameters signalling subordination in these languages and by a comparative analysis of the competing strategies in which a discourse-based, functional framework will be applied to the corpora of authentic oral and written texts. The roles played by language contact and borrowing will also be assessed.

The first year will be dedicated to fieldwork, data analysis and studying the immediate linguistic context in Tajikistan. During the second year, in Tajikistan and Moscow, the data will be analysed and evaluated.

The third year, at Uppsala University, will be dedicated to application on Iranic languages, knowledge exchange with the Swedish and international research community (workshops, seminars), the co-organization of a conference on  subordination in Iranic languages, and the publication of articles and an open-access monograph.

The study will not only fill in the gaps on the syntactic map of Iranic languages, but will also be crucial for understanding the role of language contact and the patterns of transfer of syntactic structures from one language to another.