Lee Sooman Noah. A grammar of Iranian Azerbaijani

University of Sussex, 1996. — 290 p.This thesis provides a description of the basic structures of Iranian Azerbaijani based on a functional-typological approach to the study of languages, which is developed by T. Givon and others. In introducing the language, it is underlined that hitherto there has not been a systematic description of Azerbaijani beyond the level of morphology. This grammar describes from the phonology to the syntax of the language, which is used by about twenty million speakers in northwestern Iran. The overall structure of the grammatical description falls into three parts: phonology (Chapter 2), morphology (Chapters 3-5), and syntax (Chapters 6-13). The arrangement shows that the syntax is the major thrust of this thesis. A brief phonological overview is found in Chapter 2, where the vowels and consonants are introduced along with other phonological phenomena, including the vowel harmony rules and their violations. Chapter 3 describes the noun, Chapter 4 the verb, and Chapter 5 other word classes, explaining the form and function of various morphemes. It is noted that Azerbaijani, being an agglutinative language, has a rich morphology. The syntax comprises these components: the structures and functions of simple clauses, copular and verbal, are dealt with in Chapter 6; two syntactic models of Azerbaijani noun phrases are described in Chapter 7; the grammatical categories of tense, aspect, modality, and negation, which operate in both simple clauses and complex sentences, are dealt with in Chapter 8; the functions and syntax of five morphologically distinctive voices, transitivization and causation are described in Chapter 9; three types of subordinate clauses—complement clauses (Chapter 10), relative clauses (Chapter 11), adverbial clauses (Chapter 12)—are described along with their pre-posed and post-posed positions. The end of Chapter 12 is on clausal coordinations. Finally, Chapter 13 describes non-declarative speech acts, namely imperative and interrogative.