Arsalan Kahnemuyipour

Photo credit: Maeve Doyle

Graduate Appointment: Graduate Linguistics Program

Professor Kahnemuyipour earned his PhD in Linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto in 2004 and worked at Syracuse University for six years before joining the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2010. He specializes in the syntax (sentence structure) of human languages and works mainly on the Syntax of Iranian languages, including but not limited to his native language Persian. He is a community organizer and activist and enjoys watching movies, soccer and basketball in his spare time.

Current Courses

Fall/Winter 2024-25:

• LIN332 (Syntactic Theory)

Education

• PhD, Linguistics, University of Toronto
  • Dissertation: The Syntax of Sentential Stress
• MA, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), Allameh Tabataba’i University (Tehran, Iran)
  • Thesis: Multicompetence: The Compound State of a Mind with Two Grammars
• BSc, Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran)

Areas of Teaching and Research Interests 

• Syntax 
• Nominal linkers in Iranian languages and beyond  
• Copular clauses 
• Agreement systems 
• Wh-questions 
• Syntax-prosody interface 

Selected Publications

Book

• Taghipour, S., & Kahnemuyipour, A. (2023). Nominal Linkers in Iranian Languages. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
• Kahnemuyipour, A. (2009). The Syntax of Sentential Stress. Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, 25. Oxford University Press.

Articles

• Gündoğdu, S., Kahnemuyipour, A., & Peters, S. (2024). The morphosyntax of Ezafe in Southern Zazaki. The Linguistic Review. doi:10.1515/tlr-2024-2013
• Kahnemuyipour, A., Shabani, M., & Taghipour, S. (2024). Gilaki Reverse Ezafe: The two faces of a nominal linker. Syntax, 1–17. doi:10.1111/synt.12277
• Bejar, S., & Kahnemuyipour, A. (2023). Agree and the syntax of specificational subjects. Syntax, 1–29. doi:10.1111/synt.12256
• Kahnemuyipour, A. (2022). Nominalization in Persian: Evidence for low negation. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7(1). (30 pages.) doi:10.16995/glossa.5819 
• Bejar, S., & Kahnemuyipour, A. (2017). Non-canonical Agreement in Copular Clauses. Journal of Linguistics, 53, 463–499.
• Kahnemuyipour, A. (2014). Revisiting the Persian Ezafe construction: A roll-up movement analysis. Lingua, 150, 1–24.
• Kahnemuyipour, A., & Megerdoomian, K. (2011). Second Position Clitics in the vP Phase: The Case of the Armenian Auxiliary. Linguistic Inquiry, 42(1), 152–162.
• Kahnemuyipour, A. (2003). Syntactic Categories and Persian Stress in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 21(2), 333–379.

Selected Grants, Fellowships and Awards

• SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Co-investigator, 2021–present, Persian questions: uncovering hidden syntactic structure with experimental methods
• SSHRC Insight Grant , Principal Investigator, 2018–present, The Syntax of Nominal Linkers
• SSHRC Insight Grant, Co-investigator, 2013–2022, Copular Agreement Systems: Locality and Domains
• SSHRC Insight Grant, Collaborator, 2017–2022, Multilingualism in the Canadian context: language interaction and development in trilingual children