Hi, my name is Komeil Ahari. 

I'm a Linguistics Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University. I specialize in syntax and my research focuses on the syntax of Farsi (Persian) word order and the interesting orders that surface in different phrasal domains. 

While Persian has generally been analyzed as a SOV language in the literature, the seemingly mixed linear ordering of elements in different phrases (as well as in the domain of Complex Verbs – those verbs containing a nonverbal and a light verbal unit) point to some inconsistencies in the traditional word order accounts. I take these inconsistencies to argue that Persian begs for a unified analysis for deriving the different word orders. 

I’ve proposed that all phrases in Farsi are head-initial and that the “mixed” orders are derived from a basic hierarchical Specifier-Head-Complement relationship. My research, therefore, bears on the cross-linguistic debate in the syntactic literature as to which of the two following theories best captures mixed headedness in languages: (1) whether complements are selected to the left or to the right of their heads is due to inherent properties of heads as lexical items, or (2) all heads uniformly select their complements to either the left or to the right, and heads and phrases subsequently move in the syntax.