Persian ezāfe as a contact-induced feature

The paper addresses the origin of the right-branching morphosyntactic pattern known as the ezāfe construction, which permeates the Persian noun phrase syntax. In Section 1, I attempt to demonstrate that this construction poses challenges for word order typology. Furthermore, it represents a deviation from the pattern of left-branching, predominant in the nominal syntax of those modern Iranian languages that avoided intensive contacts with Persian. In Section 2, I extend the analysis to Old and Middle Iranian and argue that the right-branching construction with the relative pronoun haya- / taya- functioning as a linker, the ancestor of the later ezāfe construction, was grammaticized in Old Persian. Section 3 constitutes the core of this paper, and presents arguments for the influence of the Elamite language on syntactic restructuring in Old Persian. First, Elamite shares with Persian the unusual combination of the basic SOV word order and right-branching nominal syntax. Second, Elamite constructions with class agreement could plausibly be calqued by noun phrases with the Old Persian relative pronoun haya- / taya- in the linking function. Third, the demonstrable language shift from Elamite to Iranian along the northern shore of the Persian Gulf in the first millennium BCE provides a suitable sociolinguistic correlate for partial syntactic restructuring in Old Persian. Section 4 tackles the arguments for Urartian, alongside Elamite, aff ecting Iranian nominal syntax, and pleads for their inconclusive character. Section 5 addresses noun phrases in Bactrian, Khwarezmian, and Younger Avestan, which may potentially be used as evidence against the proposed scenario, and off ers their alternative interpretations.