A Case-Based Analysis of Ezafe Construction in Central Kurdish

Rebeen  Abdullah Kareem

doi:10.25098/8.1.38

Authors

Rebeen Abdullah Kareem Department of English, College of Languages, University of Sulaimani, Sulaimani, Iraq

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25098/8.1.38

Keywords:

Central Kurdish, Ezafe construction, NP modifiers and complements, case-based analysis, case theory

Abstract

This study addresses the nature, characteristics, and function of Ezafe morpheme in Central Kurdish. Such a morpheme is a distinctive grammatical feature of not only Central Kurdish but also all other Iranian languages. Although there have been many studies on the Ezafe Construction in Iranian languages especially Persian, very few studies have been conducted on the Ezafe in Central Kurdish. After reviewing the main studies and analyses proposed in the literature, the study offers a case-based analysis of the Ezafe construction in Central Kurdish. Drawing data examples mainly from the language under study, it becomes evident that the Ezafe morpheme occurs between nominal elements within a range of different phrases such as NP, PP, QP, and AP. Following Chomsky’s 1981 case theory and the recent analysis proposed by Larson and Samiian (2018; 2020) for Persian Ezafe, the paper argues that the morpheme satisfies a licensing requirement in the following phrase, similar to ‘of’ in English. A number of arguments from the nature and behavior of prepositional phrases after Ezafe, and the occurrence of Ezafe with relative and complement clauses strongly support the analysis offered in this study. The study also proposes an explanation for the reason behind the different realizations of Ezafe in Central Kurdish.

References

• Anderson, S. R. 1993. “Wackernagel’s Revenge: Clitics, Morphology, and the syntax of Second Position.” Language 69:68-98.

• Anderson, S. R. 2005. Aspects of the Theory of Clitics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Anderson, S. R. 2013 ‘The Marker of the English ‘Group Genitive’ is a Special Clitic, not an Inflection’ in Morphosyntactic categories and the expression of possession (Kersti Börjars, David Denison & Alan Scott, eds.; Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 199). 193–217. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Atlamaz, Ü. 2016. ‘Merging modifiers of an NP before its arguments’. In K. Kim, P. Umbal, T. Block, Q. Chan, T. Cheng, K. Finney, M. Katz, S. Nickel Thompson and L. Shorten (eds) Proceedings of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings project: 47-56.

• Bowers, J. 1993. ‘The syntax of predication’. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 591–656.

• Bowers, J. 2001. Predication. In The handbook of contemporary syntactic theory, ed. by Mark Baltin and Chris Collins, 299-333. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

• Chomsky, N. 2000. ‘Minimalist inquiries: The framework’. In R. Martin, D. Michaels, and J. Uriagereka (eds) Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. Cambridge: MIT Press. 89-155.

• Chomsky, N. 2001. ‘Derivation by phase’. In M. Kenstowicz (ed.) Ken Hale: A Life in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1-52.

• Cinque, G. 1994. ‘On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance determiner phrase’. In G. Cinque, J. Koster, J-Y. Pollock, L. Rizzi and R. Zanuttini (eds.) Paths towards Universal Grammar. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. 85-110.

• Cinque, G. 2005. ‘Deriving Greenberg’s universal 20 and its exceptions’. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 315-332.

• Cinque, G. 2010. The Syntax of Adjectives: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Den Dikken, M. Singhapreecha. 2004. ‘Complex noun phrases and linkers’. Syntax 7. 1–54.

• Enç, M. 1991. ‘The semantics of specificity’. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 1-25.

• Fattah, M. 1997. A Generative Grammar of Kurdish. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.

• Franco, L., M. R. Manzini and L. M. Savoia. 2015. ‘Linkers and agreement’. The Linguistic Review 32: 277-332.

• Ghomeshi, J. 1997. ‘Non-projecting nouns and the ezafe construction in Persian’. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 15: 729-788.

• Ginzburg, J. and I. A. Sag. 2000. Interrogative investigations. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications

• Haider, H. and R. Zwanziger. 1984. ‘Relatively attributive. The ezāfe-construction from Old Iranian to Modern Persian’. In J. Fisiak (ed.) Historical syntax. Berlin: Mouton. 137- 172.

• Heim, I. and A. Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Malden, MA: Wiley.

• Heim, I. 1982. ‘The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts.

• Holmberg, A. and D. Odden. 2004. ‘The Izafe and NP structure in Hawrami’. Durham Working Papers in Linguistics 9: 77-93.

• Holmberg, A. and D. Odden. 2008. ‘The noun phrase in Hawrami’. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian and D. Stilo (eds) Aspects of Iranian Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 129-152.

• Jackendoff, R. 1973. The base rules for prepositional phrases. In Stephen R. Anderson & Paul Kiparsky (eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle, 345–356. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

• Jackendoff, R. 1977. X-bar syntax: A study of phrase structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Kahnemuyipour, A. 2006. ‘Persian Ezafe construction: case, agreement or something else’. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Persian Language and Computer 3-16, Tehran University.

• Kahnemuyipour, A. 2014. Revisiting the Persian Ezafe construction: A roll-up movement analysis. Lingua 150. 1–24.

• Kahnemuyipour, A. 2016. ‘The Ezafe construction: Persian and beyond’. Paper presented at the 2nd ConCALL conference, Indiana University.

• Karimi, S. and M. Brame. 1986. A generalization concerning the Ezafe construction in Persian. West Coast Conference in Linguistics (WECOL 86), Vancouver, Canada.

• Karimi, S. and M. Brame. 2012. A generalization concerning the Ezafe construction in Persian. Linguistic Analysis 38. 111–144.

• Karimi, Y. 2007. ‘Kurdish Ezafe construction: Implications for DP structure’. Lingua 117: 2159-2177.

• Klavans, J. L. 1985. ‘The independence of syntax and phonology in cliticization’. Language 61: 95-120.

• Lapointe, S. 1990. EDGE features in GPSG. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 26. 221–235. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

• Lapointe, S. 1991. Life on the EDGE: Arguments in favor of an autolexical account of edge inflections. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 28. 318–332. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

• Larson, R. F.C. Adjectives, case and concord. In A0: The Adjective as a Lexical Category, Phoevos Panagiotidis and Moreno Mitrovic (eds). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Larson, R. and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Larson, R. and Samiian, V. 2020. “The Ezafe construction revisited”. In Richard K. Larson Sedigheh Moradi, and Vida Samiian (eds). Advances in Iranian Linguistics. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 351: 173-236.

• Larson, R. and Samiian, V. 2018. Ezafe, PP and the nature of nominalization. Paper presented at the 54th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

• Larson, R and Yamakido 2005. “Ezafe and the Deep Position of Nominal Modifiers,” Paper presented at the Barcelona Workshop on Adjectives and Adverbs, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

• Lyons, C. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Mackenzie, D. N. 1961. Kurdish Dialect Studies. London: Oxford University Press.

• Miller, P. H. 1992. ‘Postlexical Cliticization vs. Affixation: Coordination Criteria’, Proceedings of the 28th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: CLS. 382–396.

• Moinzadeh, A. 2001. ‘An antisymmetric, minimalist approach to Persian phrase structure’. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa.

• Nichols, J. 1986. ‘Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar.’ Language 62: 56- 119.

• Parsafar, P. 2010. ‘Syntax, morphology, and semantics of Ezafe’. Iranian Studies 43: 637-666.

• Pesetsky, D. and E. Torrego. 2007. The syntax of valuation and the interpretability of features. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian and W. Wilkins, (eds.) Phrasal and clausal architecture. 262–294. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

• Pollard, C., and I. A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

• Samiian, Vida. 1983. Structure of phrasal categories in Persian: An X-bar analysis. Unpublished UCLA PhD Dissertation. Los Angeles, CA.

• Samiian, V. 1994. ‘The Ezafe construction: Some implications for the theory of X-bar syntax’. In M. Marashi (ed.), Persian Studies in North America. Bethesda: Maryland. 17-41.

• Samvelian, P. 2006. ‘When morphology does better than syntax: the Ezafe construction in Persian. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Universite´ de Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle.

• Samvelian, P. 2007. A (phrasal) affix analysis of the Persian Ezafe. Journal of Linguistics 43. 605–645.

• Samvelian, P. 2008. ‘The Ezafe as a head-marking inflectional affix: evidence from Persian and Kurmanji Kurdish. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian and D. Stilo (eds.) Aspects of Iranian Linguistics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 339-361.

• Spencer, A. 1991. Morphological Theory: An Introduction to Word Structure in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

• Strunk, J. 2003. ‘The structure of the Kurdish noun phrase’. Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Cologne.

• Strunk, J. 2005. ‘Postnominal modification in Kurdish’. Last accessed September 15, 2022, from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251783008.

• Svenonius, P. 2003. Limits on P: Filling in holes vs. falling in holes. Nordlyd, Tromsø Working Papers on Language and Linguistics. Proceedings of the 19th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, 31, 431–445.

• Tahir, R. 2018. The Structure of DP in Central Kurdish. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Newcastle University, UK.

• Toosarvandani, M. and Van Urk, C. 2012. ‘Directionality and intervention in nominal concord: Evidence from Zazaki ezafe’. Handout version of a poster at North East Linguistic Society 43.

• Tseng, J. 2003. Phrasal affixes and French morphosyntax. In Gerald, Penn, Jäger, Gerhard, Monachesi, Paola & Wintner, Shuly (eds.), Proceedings of Formal Grammar 2003, 177-188. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

• Windfuhr, G. 1989. ‘Western Iranian dialects’. In R. SCHMITT (ed.), Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 294-296.

• Zwicky, A. and G. K. Pullum. 1983. ‘Cliticization vs. inflection: English n’t’. Language 59: 502-513.

• Zwicky, A. 1987. Suppressing the Zs. Journal of Linguistics 23. 133–148.