I joined the ACLC in January 2021 as a postdoctoral researcher in the NWO Vidi project "Exceptions rule! Lexical restrictions on grammatical structure" led by Eva van Lier.  The project is reaching its end. Katherine Walker, the PhD researcher of our group, defended her thesis on September 20th and I am looking for new oppurtunties. In the meantime I am based in ACLC as a guest researcher.

My research focuses on the study of syntactic alternation from a typological as well as a cognitive perspective. I worked on word order variations in Persian during my doctoral research and later extended my research on word order to other languages such as French, Armenian and Kurmanji. Another aspect of my work on Persian involves light verb constructions. In the ACLC, I carried out a priming experiment to investigate the effect of lexical bias in alternating LVCs together with Eva van Lier and Monique Flecken. I also collaborated in several corpus studies on argument coding alternation across various languages, namely, Kamang, Chechen and Uruangnirin. Getting interested in the topic of argument indexing, I undertook a new study looking into the use of the redundant subject marker -eš used optionally in colloquial Persian, while banned in standard Persian. 

For my publications prior to 2021 see my CV at HAL Open Science. 

I completed my PhD on word order variations in Persian in 2016 at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. My thesis presents a corpus-based and experimental investigation of the linear ordering of verbal arguments in the preverbal domain, to address (i) syntactic issues related to the structure of Persian VP and (ii) hypotheses put forward in cross-linguistic studies on word order preferences, in particular, on the effect of grammatical weight. After my PhD, I carried out research on word order variations in French, Armenian and Kurdish using corpus and/or experimental data in collaboration with different colleague (Juliette Thuilier, Pollet Samvelian, Victoria Khurshudyan, Milad Shariatmadari).

From 2012 to 2021, I was an active member of the Laboratoire d’excellence “Fondements Empiriques de la Linguistique" (Labex EFL) and participated in different work packages (WPs "Word order preferences among complements" and "Full vs elliptic clause alternation" in strand 2 Experimental grammar in a cross-linguistic perspective, WP "Languages, Dialects and Isoglosses of the Iran-Caucasus-Anatolia-Near-East Area" in strand 3 Typology and dynamics of linguistic systems and WP "Developing morphological and syntactic resources for western Iranian languages" in strand 6 Language resources).

Between 2017 and 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne. First in project led by Prof. Aria Adli (Romance studies) within the SFB 1252 "Prominence in Language" and then in the Department of African studies with Prof. Anne Storch. 

In 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the project "Experimental material for field linguistics and typological studies" led by Prof. Pollet Samvelian (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Prof. Anaid Donabedian (INaLCO) within Labex EFL strands 3 and 6.  

Between 2012 and 2017, I was a member of the teaching staff at the Department of Linguistics of Sorbonne Nouvelle University and taught different BA courses (e.g. Methodology in Linguistics & Academic work, Introduction to linguistics, (French) grammar, (French) Lexicology, Syntax, Formal semantics, Statistics) and participated in MA and doctoral lectures. I also taught BA courses there as a part-time teacher in 2019 and 2020. 

In 2019, I taught a course entitled "Experimental & Corpus Methods in Linguistics" (with Prof. Pollet Samvelian) at the summer school of Yerevan Academy for Linguistics and Philosophy (YALP) held in the American University of Yerevan.