Behbahani

Behbahani is an endangered Southwestern Iranian language spoken primarily in Behbahan, Iran. As a primarily oral language without a standardized writing system, linguistic documentation and formal analysis are crucial for its study and preservation.

From a typological perspective, Behbahani presents unique and compelling puzzles for theoretical syntax and morphology. It exhibits a complex verbal agreement system and split alignment, while notably completely lacking morphological case.

Research & Core Puzzles

My research explores how argument structure, verbal stems, agreement, and alignment interact in Behbahani grammar. A central focus of my dissertation is investigating how much of what appears to be “morphological” on the surface is actually driven by deeper syntactic structure, specifically examining:

• The syntax of Voice and related functional projections.
• Stem alternations and their interaction with aspect and transitivity.
• Nominalization patterns and argument licensing.

Documentation & Computational Resources

Given the limited digital and descriptive resources available for Behbahani, a key goal of my work is creating formal and computational tools to make the language more visible within mainstream linguistic research.

Computational Modeling

• Haskell FSA Models: I am currently developing finite-state automata (FSA) models written in Haskell to formally capture and computationally verify Behbahani’s complex split-agreement patterns. (Links to the GitHub repository and code documentation will be available here).

Corpus Development

• Fieldwork Data: This section will host upcoming curated documentation materials, text collections, and syntactic descriptions intended for both theoretical researchers and the language community.