Rate My Professor Arsalan Kahnemuyipour

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, with a graduate appointment as Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto St. George campus. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 2004, with the dissertation The Syntax of Sentential Stress supervised by Diane Massam. His earlier degrees include an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Allameh Tabataba’i University, with the thesis Multicompetence: The Compound State of a Mind with Two Grammars, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Prior to joining the University of Toronto Mississauga as Assistant Professor in 2010, Kahnemuyipour held a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at Syracuse University from 2007 to 2010 and a non-tenure-track Assistant Professor position there from 2004 to 2007. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015 and to full Professor in 2023.

Kahnemuyipour specializes in the syntax of human languages, working mainly on Iranian languages including Persian. His research interests encompass nominal linkers in Iranian languages and beyond, copular clauses, agreement systems, wh-questions, second position clitics, and the syntax-prosody interface. He authored the book The Syntax of Sentential Stress (Oxford University Press, 2009), reviewed in the Journal of Linguistics. Selected publications include Gilaki Reverse Ezafe: The two faces of a nominal linker (Syntax, 2024, with M. Shabani and S. Taghipour), Agree and the syntax of specificational subjects (Syntax, 2023, with S. Bejar), Nominalization in Persian: Evidence for low negation (Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2022), Object attraction and the role of structural hierarchy: Evidence from Persian (Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 2020, with J. Franck, F. Mirdamadi), Non-canonical Agreement in Copular Clauses (Journal of Linguistics, 2017, with S. Bejar), Revisiting the Persian Ezafe construction: A roll-up movement analysis (Lingua, 2014), Syntactic Categories and Persian Stress (Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 2003), and On Wh-questions in Persian (Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 2001). He has received SSHRC Insight Grants as Principal Investigator for The Syntax of Nominal Linkers ($141,988, 2018–2023) and Co-investigator on Copular Agreement Systems: Locality and Domains ($167,411, 2013–2020), Persian questions: uncovering hidden syntactic structure with experimental methods ($32,055, 2021–2023), and Multilingualism in the Canadian context: language interaction and development in trilingual children ($183,816, 2017–2022), as well as a Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute Grant ($40,000, 2019–2021).