The aim of the present study is to investigate how men and women in three Iranian Balochi dialects, Coastal Balochi, Koroshi Balochi and Sistani Balochi, refer to 3rd person participants in oral narratives of two genres: folktales and biographical tales. The stories that are analysed were recorded during several field trips to Iran and the approach used is that of Levinsohn (1994, 2015). The first part of the dissertation begins with an overview of the Balochi language and its dialects, including a brief presentation of its phonology, and then reviews previous studies of Balochi, before introducing the case system and types of alignment in the three dialects. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the status of orality in the three dialects, before giving details about the corpus of texts that were analysed. Of particular note is the fact that each story in the corpus was told by both a man and a woman. Chapter 3 examines different approaches to the analysis of participant reference, before comparing those of Gundel et al. and Levinsohn in greater detail. The second part of the dissertation applies Levinsohn’s approach to texts in each of the three dialects in turn. Chapters 4–6 identify and analyse the different ways in which the participants in the stories are referred to when the subject remains the same and in three specific situations when the subject changes. This enables default encoding values to be established for each of the four situations. Motivations for over-encoding and, in some situations, under-encoding, are then identified. Chapters 7–9 investigate whether the gender of the storyteller (male versus female) and/or the genre of the story (folktale versus biographical tale) influence the way that the participants are referred to. This leads in chapter 10 to a gender- and genre-based comparison of participant reference across the present dialects. Conclusions are presented in chapter 11. In general, the participant reference strategy used was the same in all three dialects, regardless of the gender or the genre. The main exception involved reported conversations in Koroshi Balochi, where the additive enclitic ham was attached to the reference to a subject who responded in line with the contents of the speech reported in the previous sentence. Other variations appeared to depend on the degree to which the storyteller was proficient in his or her art. The dissertation concludes with four Appendices. Appendix A presents six texts that were interlinearised using the FLEx programme, while Appendix B consists of participant reference charts of the same texts following Levinsohn’s approach. Appendix C presents details of the case system and alignment for each of the three dialects. Finally, the chart in Appendix D compares the approaches of Levinsohn and of Gundel et al. to participant reference in a specific text. A CD with audio files of the six texts and some photos taken during fieldwork is also available.

The vowel systems of five selected Iranian Balochi dialects are investigated in this study, which is the first work to apply empirical acoustic analysis to a large body of recorded data on the vowel inventories of different Balochi dialects spoken in Iran. The selected dialects are spoken in the five regions of Sistan (SI), Saravan (SA), Khash (KH), Iranshahr (IR), and Chabahar (CH) located in the province Sistan and Baluchestan in southeast Iran. The aim of the present fieldwork-based survey is to study how similar the vowel systems of these dialects are to the Common Balochi vowel system (i, iː, u, uː, a, aː, eː, oː), which is represented as the vowel inventory for the Balochi dialects in general, as well as how similar these dialects are to one another.  The investigation shows that length is contrastive in these dialects, although the durational dif-ferences between the long and short counterparts are quite small in some dialects. The study also reveals that there are some differences between the vowel systems of these dialects and the Com-mon Balochi sound inventory. The Common Balochi short /i/ vowel is modified to short /e/ in these dialects, and a strong tendency for the long /eː/ and /oː/ to become the diphthongs ie and ue, respec-tively, is observed in some of the investigated dialects, specifically in KH, which shows heavier diphthongization than the other dialects. It is also observed, especially in SI, SA, and CH, that the short /u/ shows strong tendencies to shift towards a lower position of an [o] vowel. In SI and SA, this shift seems to be a correlate of syllable structure, with lowering occurring mostly in closed syllables. It is possible that Persian, as the dominant language in the area, has had an influence on these dialects and caused a lowering tendency among the higher vowels.  The vowel systems in these dialects differ slightly from each other. Phonemically, the pairs e/eː, a/aː, u/uː, and the long vowels /iː/ and /oː/ are suggested for IR; the pairs a/aː, u/uː, the short /e/ and the long /iː/ as well as the diphthongs /ie/ and /ue/ substituted for the long /eː/ and /oː/, respectively, are suggested for KH; and finally the pairs e/eː, a/aː, o/oː, and the long vowels /iː/ and /uː/, which make a more symmetrical inventory, are suggested for the SI, SA, and CH dialects. In general, the vowels in these dialects show a range of phonetic variations. In addition, processes of fronting, which is most common in coronal contexts, and nasalization, which mostly occurs in nasal envi-ronments, are observed in the data researched.

This work presents a first study of discourse features in Balochi narratives of Sistan. Discourse analysis investigates what are the properties that make for well-formed texts in a language. There are many approaches to discourse analysis and most approaches focus on a particular aspect of text formation. The approach to text linguistics or discourse analysis taken in this work is based on Dooley and Levinsohn’s Analyzing Discourse: A manual of basic concepts (2001). Their methodology has been refined over years of practical use and, among diverse methodologies, they follow a functional and cognitive approach. In this dissertation, Roberts’ (2009) application of Dooley and Levinsohn’s methodology to Persian is followed in the study of our Sistani Balochi text corpus. In chapters 2-7 this approach is applied to Balochi narrative text. Chapter two introduces the reader to the discourse-pragmatic structuring of sentences in BS and chapter three shows how different syntactic devices can distinguish foreground and background information in BS oral texts. In chapter four we study the deixis of time and place and how the concept of proximal and distal deixis applies across a range of deictic elements. Chapter five examines some basic connectives and how they link propositions in the discourse context, and in chapter six reported speech is studied. Chapter seven illustrates how different participants are introduced into a discourse and how their activation status is signalled throughout the discourse. Appendix 1 contains details of the Balochi text-corpus used, and Appendix 2 contains interlinearized versions of ten of the main texts used in the study. A CD with nine audio files and one video file of the ten texts from Appendix 2, plus one extra video file, is also included.