This essay provides a general introductory survey of Iranian and Iran-related studies in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century (including languages, literature, and the arts), with a very brief preliminary foray into earlier Iran-related scholarship and wide-ranging imaginations of Iran in Britain and Ireland, as well as some concluding remarks on contemporary knowledge production about Britain in Iran. Among other themes covered in the essay are the varied contributions of non-Britons and non-Irish to Iran-related scholarship and imaginations in the United Kingdom, underscoring the overall transnational production, dissemination, reception, and utilization of knowledge (history, geography, archaeology, cultures, ethnography and anthropology, art and architecture, Iran-related Persian-language literatures and poetry, etc.). In particular, the essay highlights the contributions made by individuals from, and institutions in, the Indian subcontinent to “British” scholarship and knowledge about Iran.

This paper classifies Persian negative elements and analyzes the negative structures based on Minimalism and Distributed Morphology. Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in Persian which have [−neg] check its feature against [+neg] of negative marker for convergence. Negative Concord Items (NCIs), which are inherently negative, have [+neg]. Thus, in the NC Sentences, we have two [+neg]—one in negative marker, and the other in NCI. It can be misread that a NC structure, like Double Negation, delivers an affirmative reading. To prevent the misreading, we assumed Neg-absorption and Neg-criterion. However, that is impossible in Double Negation with two negative markers placed in different NegP, so the [+neg] in the sentence remain till Logical Form (LF) and they cancel each other and, as a result, the sentence becomes affirmative. Based on Minimalism and Distributed Morphology, the unified account on the structure of negation is examined.

In this literary analysis of the Akvan Div story in the Shahnama, the author proposes to read the story through the lens of more ancient texts to arrive at a better understanding of the trickster “archetype” in Iranian culture. After a brief introduction to and critique of Jungian archetypal theory and some remarks on the proposed method of “etymological reading,” a structural summary of the story is offered. The analysis that follows shows that in this reading, the story appears in its unity and parts that are usually seen as epic digressions become meaningful.

Iranians are one of Finland's major immigrant groups. Like other asylum seekers in Finland, the Iranians brought with them their own cultural practices, attitudes and beliefs regarding marriage and family structure. The aim of this research was to study factors associated with married Iranian women's contraceptive use in Finland. A total of 120 married women with more than one child were interviewed in Turku, a costal city situated about 200km from Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The questionnaires gathered information about the respondents' socio-demographic status, knowledge and use of contraception, number of children, length of time in Finland, education level and other social characteristics. Our research shows that the social factors that are associated with the Iranian women's contraceptive use are mainly due to changes in their conditions of life and adaptation to the Finnish society.

Despite the great number of studies conducted by Western scholars exploring kinship terminologies in different languages, there seems to have been little attempt at dealing with kin words in Iranian languages like Kurdish. More specifically, Kalhori, as a southern dialect of Kurdish, has rarely been subject to studies of this nature. Underlining the significance of such studies in the wider linguistic and anthropological contexts, this study attempts to explore kin words Kalhori speakers use to refer to or address their relatives. We also make an attempt to investigate the possibility of presenting a formal explanation of the terms by placing them in a componential analysis framework.

Deep geopolitical changes in the South Caucasus have considerably influenced the relationships of Iran and the three republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Geographical location and strategic significance have made this region one of the most important in the world. Because of its historical affinities and socio-cultural links with the region's peoples, the Islamic Republic of Iran has expanded political-economic cooperation with them. The active presence of regional and trans-regional actors has directly affected this relation. This article mainly seeks to examine Iran's relations with the South Caucasus republics, considering the opportunities created since their independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although ezafe has been studied by many scholars for many years, it does not yet have a transparent grammatical status. Grammarians have regarded ezafe as a polysemous “word” carrying over ten different “meanings/functions.” After a brief review of the previous treatments of ezafe, this paper will present a syntactic analysis, followed by a morphological description and a semantic analysis of this ubiquitous morpheme. It will also compare the distributional properties of other relevant bound morphemes with those of the ezafe. It will finally conclude that ezafe is a dummy clitic-like morpheme which is semantically void, while syntactically it functions as an “associative marker” which subordinates its [+N] host, on the left, to its following complements.

A long-standing puzzle in our knowledge of the culture surrounding the Shahnama lies in the fact that its illustrations, which became so well known, postdate the appearance of the text by nearly 300 years. There are several ways of explaining this anomaly. All contribute something to our understanding of Iranian culture, but none is entirely satisfactory. This essay suggests that a solution may lie in a better understanding of the social and ideological consequences of Mongol rule and/or in the peculiarities of urban culture at the time.

The paper begins by summarizing the basic information about the Shahnama produced in Herat for the Timurid prince Baysunghur, son of Shah Rukh, in 833/1430, one of the three iconic illustrated versions of Firdausi's poem in Persian painting. It then considers in turn the originality of this manuscript, its iconographic program and the intervals at which the images are placed within the text. The themes of enthronement and combat or battle are explored at length, as are the page layout, the role of illumination and the technique and execution of the paintings.

This paper fills in the gap in the literature by providing an acoustic analysis of rhotics in Persian and considers the social variables gender and register. Through the acoustic analysis of 807 tokens, it demonstrates that that there are a number of rhotic variants in Persian in different positions in the word and finds evidence of degemination in coda position, against previous accounts. Furthermore, it suggests that on the one hand, Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women's rhotic production patterns with those of Arabic societies as men favor rhotics with more complex articulations. On the other hand it questions whether the behavior of Tehrani-Persian speaking men and women conforms to established sociolinguistic norms regarding prestige and gender.

Although Persian language instruction has been facing demand outside Iran, little research has been conducted and few findings are available on teaching Persian to heritage speakers. This work studies teaching Persian language to students with a Persian background or second-generation Persians who have been raised outside Iran. I study the characteristics of heritage Persian speakers and describe their linguistics abilities and attitudes. Heritage learners are different from both foreign learners of Persian and native speakers of Persian. This article provides an underlying foundation for the research within the field of teaching Persian to heritage Persian speakers. Providing this general sketch will hopefully draw more attention to the promotion of a stronger educational system and more research on preserving and revitalizing Persian language amongst the new generation of Iranians living abroad.

Notwithstanding its brevity, Firdausi's account of Iskandar's visit to the Ka‘ba in Mecca was depicted regularly in illustrated manuscripts of the Shahnama from the fourteenth century to early modern times. An examination of these illustrations reveals the extent to which poetical and pictorial narratives diverged over the centuries, with an increasing expansion of the shrine's setting and emphasis on ritual performance and with Iskandar evolving from a passive bystander to a devout hajji. This study also offers a telling instance of the way the representation of a Shahnama scene could be transformed in response to another poetic text, specifically the Khamsa of Nizami.