The languages of Western Asia belong to a variety of language families but share numerous features on account of being in areal contact for many centuries. This volume presents descriptions of the individual languages of this area, overview chapters
The Iranian languages provide a rare documented instance of a shift from accusative alignment to split-ergativity, yet historical syntax has largely overlooked this case. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of alignment change in Iranian, tracing its evolution from Old Persian (5th century BC) to the present. The initial section challenges the idea that ergativity in Middle Iranian arose from an Old Iranian agented passive construction, proposing instead that it is linked to External Possession. The mechanisms involved are characterized by the extension of an existing construction rather than reanalysis, with Non-Canonical Subjecthood and Indirect Participation playing crucial roles. The second part presents a comparative analysis of contemporary West Iranian, revealing that various morphosyntactic components—such as agreement, nominal case marking, and cliticization—developed independently. This decoupling led to the diverse alignment types observed in Iranian, paralleling past-tense alignments in Indo-Aryan. The book includes data from over 20 Iranian languages, making it accessible to non-specialists, and discusses broader themes such as the adequacy of functional accounts of case system changes, discourse pressure, animacy, linguistic drift, and alignment in early Indo-European.
Although Turkish relative constructions have figured prominently in both studies on Turkish grammar as well as in cross-language studies on relative constructions, there has yet to be a comprehensive treatment of subject. The present study is an attempt to fill that gap by providing a detailed, data-driven investigation of the structure. The theoretical framework is functional/typological, but other theoretical perspectives are also afforded due consideration. Topics covered include the nature of participles, subject expression in relative clauses, the role of relative clauses compared to other adnominal attributes, the diachronic emergence of participial relative clauses, discourse-strategies with non-participial relative constructions, noun phrase accessibility, case recovery or construal of relative clauses, and the conditions determining the choice of participle. The text is richly illustrated with several hundred fully analyzed examples as well as an appendix giving the full details of the text corpus along with some quantitative analysis.