Alignment change in Iranian languages

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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.