Clause cosubordination: the Yaghnobi case

Part of the SOAS Linguistics Research Seminar Series 2025-26

Speaker: Iskandar Ding

Abstract

Yaghnobi is a Northeastern Iranian language named after the Yaghnob Valley, which between the Zarafshan and Gissar mountain ranges in the Sughd Region of Tajikistan. The majority of Yaghnobi speakers now live in the Zafarobod district in northwestern Tajikistan, having been displaced from their native valley by the Soviet authorities for cotton production in 1970. Since European scholars first came into contact with the community in the late 19th century, the Yaghnobi language has attracted scholarly attention mainly due to its being the only surviving descendant of a variety of the Sogdian language, whose speakers, the Sogdians, were a significant presence in Central Asia before the advent of Islam.

Yaghnobi has a few morphosyntactic peculiarities rarely found or absent in other New Iranian languages. One of them is the phenomenon referred to in the literature as the ‘dependent paradigm’ or ‘dependent form’ (DF), whereby, in a sequence of same-subject, same-tense-aspect-mood clauses, only the initial junct bears full inflectional markers. In the non-past DF, the non-initial juncts do not carry the imperfective aspectual marker =išt, while in the past DF the personal endings are suppressed as well. This is extremely rare in New Iranian languages - only two dialects of Iranian Persian and three Tajik Persian dialects are attested to have similar operations. 

The Yaghnobi DF is a case of clause cosubordination or clause-chaining, where clauses depend on but are not embedded within one another. This type of clause linkage is well attested in Papuan and African languages but is rare elsewhere. Specifically, the Yaghnobi DF as clause-chaining represents posterior chaining, i.e. a cosubordinate structure with a finite initial verb, which is reportedly rare outside of Africa. Given that posterior chaining is often associated with VO word order, the fact that Yaghnobi is an OV language makes the Yaghnobi DF more worthy of research.

Speaker

Iskandar Ding holds a BA in Modern Languages and Linguistics from the University of Oxford, an MA in Iranian Studies from SOAS, and has just completed his PhD thesis ’Selected Features of Yaghnobi Verbal Morphosyntax: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives' at SOAS, supervised by Prof Almut Hintze and Prof Lutz Marten. His research interests include Iranian languages, Turco-Iranian linguistic contact, and Persian as well as Persianate literatures. 

Image: Eduard Galitsky, Unsplash