Haig Geoffrey. Ergativity in Iranian

Longer manuscript version, 2018. — 33 p.Iranian languages have been exposed to long-standing contact influence from a variety of genetically unrelated language groups, including Turkic, Semitic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian, and display a considerable array of typological variation. Certain typological features nevertheless characterize most modern Iranian languages:
OV word order (though post-predicate placement of goals, recipients, and addressees is extremely common in some languages, see Haig (2015);
differential object marking, though notably absent in Kurdish and Zazaki
a very high frequency of complex predicates, based on a small set of light verbs
a tense-based alignment split, affecting transitive verbs, 1 and involving some kind of ergativity, in those clauses based on verb stems etymologically derived from a participle (in most of the languages now a “past” or “perfective” verb stem)
This chapter focuses on the last feature. Though absent in some modern Iranian languages, most notably Persian, most Iranian languages have, at some point in their history, passed through a stage with an alignment split, involving ergative structures in the past tense. In the case of Persian, the relevant structures are well-attested for the Middle Persian period (Jügel 2012a), but Persian has since ironed out this wrinkle and returned to a unified accusative alignment in all tenses. Elsewhere, however, the characteristic split is still evident in various aspects of the morphosyntax.