Word Order and Agreement in Zarvani Dialect

Zarvani dialect is a language variety of Larestani which is one of the southwestern Iranian languages. This dialect is spoken in Zarvan village which is located in the south of Fars province. This paper examines the typological status of word order and agreement in Zarvani dialect, the former on the basis of Dryer’s 1992 paper titled “the Greenbergian word order correlations” and the latter based on five typological criteria of Combrie’s1978 article. The results show that Zarvani dialect shares word order parameters of both VO versus OV languages. In spite of that, the dialect tends to be more like a verb medial (VO) language in regard to languages of Eurasia and the world. Agreement in Zarvani is divided into two groups based on transitivity and tense system: (a) nominative- common rule of phoneme change in Tabari language. The second word is būm which is not used in the meaning of ‘land’ and ‘ground’ (as mentioned before) in Mazandarani dialects. There are several cases of its usage in the first meaning ‘land’ in New Iranian languages and dialects but only a few examples of its second meaning ‘ground’ (the surface of the Earth). However, the usage of this word in old Tabari poems in both meanings, especially the second one, is noteworthy. Historical linguistics is our approach to survey both words in this article.