Who Owns What? Possessive Constructions in Northern Talyshi (Anbarāni and Lankarāni Dialects)

Abstract

Talyshi, a Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan, is traditionally divided into three dialect clusters: Northern, Central, and Southern. This paper investigates possessive constructions in two Northern Talyshi dialects, Anbarāni (Iran) and Lankarāni (Azerbaijan), drawing on original fieldwork and corpus data. In the attributive domain, both dialects share three strategies: oblique marking of the possessor, the optional preposition čə, and possessive pronouns. In the predicative domain, hitherto almost undocumented, they diverge sharply: Anbarāni employs a goal-schema construction, marking the possessor with the postposition ro and an existential predicate, whereas Lankarāni employs a genitive-schema construction, in which the oblique-marked possessor is obligatorily cross-referenced by an enclitic pronoun. This divergence tracks not the traditional tripartite classification of Talyshi but the dominant contact language of each dialect — Persian for Anbarāni, Azerbaijani for Lankarāni. The findings refine the place of Northern Talyshi within the typology of Western Iranian predicative possession and provide the first description of predicative possession for any Northern Talyshi variety spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan.