Pollet Samvelian

Pollet Samvelian is a Professor of Linguistics at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research focuses on the grammatical, formal, and typological description of Iranian languages — Persian and Kurdish in particular — as well as Eastern Armenian. Her work has addressed complex predicates, clitics, the Ezafe construction, differential object marking, and word order. She has also contributed to the development of online linguistic resources, including a lexical database of Persian complex predicates (PersPred), and is familiar with corpus construction and quantitative methods.

From 2010 to 2019, she served as Director of the research laboratory Mondes iraniens et indiens (Iranian and Indian Worlds, CNRS – Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – EPHE – Inalco), a multidisciplinary unit bringing together around forty researchers and more than fifty doctoral and postdoctoral fellows, dedicated to the study of the languages, texts, histories, cultures, and societies of the Iranian and Indian worlds from the 6th century BCE to the present day.

She was co-director (2015–2025) and director (2018–2029) of the Laboratory of Excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (Labex EFL), a major ANR-funded research initiative involving more than 150 researchers, around 100 doctoral candidates, and 50 postdoctoral fellows. Within the Labex EFL, she led two work packages, including Languages, Dialects, and Isoglosses in the Caucasus/Iran/Anatolia Area (2011–2024, co-directed with Anaid Donabedian) and Developing Morphological and Syntactic Resources for Western Iranian Languages (2011–2020).

She was Principal Investigator of the ANR-DFG joint project PERGRAM (Theory and Implementation of an HPSG Grammar of Persian, 2009–2011), conducted in collaboration with Stefan Müller at the Freie Universität Berlin. The project combined formal grammar development with the creation of digital lexical resources for Persian.

She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Iranian Linguistics (Yerevan State University) and a founding member of ASOF. She is committed to advancing research on endangered dialects and to integrating oral history into structured, searchable digital archives. She serves as Co-PI, with Victoria Khurshudyan, of the work package New Heritage Multilingualism and the Public Sphere within the France 2030 project HERMES (Heritage in the Making: Emerging Strategies).