Clitic-affix interactions a corpus-based study of person marking in the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish

Clitic-affix interactions a corpus-based study of person marking
in the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish

Ergin Öpengin

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

The person-marking system of Central Kurdish, with a complex set of person-marker paradigms, presents a number of problems, especially in the manners in which different person-marker paradigms are distributed for argument-indexing. For instance, a pronominal complement of an adposition might be a person form from the paradigm of clitic person markers in a present-tense construction, but the formal expression of the same argument is switched to a verbal affix person marker in a past-tense construction. Previous scholarship (Bynon 1979; Samvelian 2007; Haig 2008; Jügel 2009) has pointed to the relevant phenomena and provided important descriptive facts, but a comprehensive treatment of the problem and an inclusive explanation to possible structural motivations behind it are still lacking. Exploration of this specific problem of the morphosyntax of Central Kurdish requires a thorough analysis of its person-marking system. Hence, in this study, morphophonological status of respective person marking paradigms is established and argumentindexing function of person-marker paradigms are thoroughly investigated, showing striking deviations from the dominant cross-linguistic tendencies in associating ‘grammatical agreement’ with affixes and ‘pronominal agreement’ or ‘cross-reference’ with ‘clitics’ (Siewierska 2004). A novel analysis of clitic placement in Central Kurdish is proposed whereby a clitic is considered to be occurring systematically following a prosodic word. The occurrence of clitic person markers on hosts of diverse syntactic and morphological status, such as syntactic phrases, morphological words and verbal inflectional morphemes ...

Table of Contents

Table of Contents / I
Acknowledgements / VII
Abbreviations / IX
List of Tables / XII
List of Figures / XII

Chapter 1: Introduction / 1
1.1 Mukri Central Kurdish and its speech community / 1
1.2 The regional "dialect" status of Mukri within Kurdish dialectology / 5
1.3 Previous work on Mukri and Central Kurdish / 9
1.4 Fieldwork and data collection behind this study / 14
1.5 The database of spoken Mukri Kurdish and the corpus of the study / 19
1.6 Goals and contents of this thesis / 2 5

Chapter 2: A Sketch Grammar of Mukri Central Kurdish / 30
2.1 Introduction / 30
2.2 Phonology / 30
2.2.1 Mukri phoneme system / 30
2.2.1.1 Vowel phonemes / 30
2.2.1.2 Consonant phonemes / 32
2.2.1.3 Description of phonemes and non-contrastive variation / 35
2.2.1.3.1 Stops and nasals / 35
2.2.1.3.2 Fricatives and affricates / 38
2.2.1.3.3 Rhotics / 41
2.2.1.3.4 Approximants / 42
2.2.1.3.5 Vowels / 43
2.2.1.4 Phoneme - grapheme associations / 46
2.2.2 Phonotactics / 47
2.2.2.1 Phoneme distribution / 47
2.2.2.2 Syllable structure / 47
2.2.2.3 Stress / 50
2.2.3 Major morphophonemic processes / 52
2.2.3.1 Pharyngeal insertion / pharyngealization / 52
2.2.3.2 Glide instertion / 53
2.2.3.3 Anaptyctic vowel insertion / 53
2.2.3.4 Consonant epenthesis / 53
2.2.3.5 Metathesis / 53
2.2.3.6 Velar palatalization / 54
2.2.3.7 Contraction / 54
2.3 Morphosyntax / 56
2.3.1 Overview of the clause / 56
2.3.1.1 Simple clauses 57
2.3.1.2 Copular clauses and similar constructions / 58
2.3.1.3 Grammatical functions and argument indexing / 60
2.3.1.4 Basic word order in the clause / 63
2.3.2 Nouns and noun morphology / 64
2.3.2.1 Nouns / 64
2.3.2.1.1 Remnant gender classes in nouns / 65
2.3.2.2 Noun derivation / 66
2.3.2.2.1 Affixation / 66
2.3.2.2.2 Compounding / 67
2.3.2.3 Local nouns / 68
2.3.2.4 Nominal inflectional morphology / 69
2.3.2.4.1 Indefiniteness suffix -ek, -ek / 70
2.3.2.4.2 Definiteness / 71
2.3.2.4.2.1 Definite suffix -eke / 71
2.3.2.4.2.2 Postnominal demonstrative suffix -e (DEMİ) / 73
2.3.2.5.3 Case, number and gender marking / 74
2.3.2.4.3.1 Vocative case / 77
2.3.2.4.3.2 Gender marking / 77
2.3.3 Verbs and verb morphology / 78
2.3.3.1 Bare verbs and their stems / 78
2.3.3.2 Derivation of new verb meanings / verb formation / 79
2.3.3.2.1 Preverbal derivation / 79
2.3.3.2.2 Adpositions and pronoun incorporation / 80
2.3.3.23 Light verb constructions / 81
2.3.3.2.4 Nominalization / 83
2.3.3.2.5 The transitivizing suffix -and / 84
2.3.3.2.6 Passivization suffixes -re/-ra / 85
2.3.3.2.7 Aspectual suffix (-ewe) / 85
2.3.3.3 Verbal inflection: tense-aspect-mood and person / 86
2.3.3.3.1 Inventory of aspect-mood and negation markers / 86
2.3.3.3.1.1 Indicative and imperfective de- / 87
2.3.3.3.1.2 Irrealisbi- 87
2.3.3.3.1.2 Negation prefixes nâ-, ne- and prohibitive me- / 87
2.3.3.3.1.5 Order and interactions of aspect-mood prefixes / 88
2.3.3.3.2 Person marking on verb forms 88
2.3.3.3.3 Verb forms of grammaticalized tense-aspect-mood / 90
2.3.3.3.3.1 Indicative present / 90
2.3.3.3.3.2 Past perfective - preterite / 90
2.3.3.3.3.3 Past imperfective / 90
2.3.3.3.3.4 Present perfect / 91
2.3.3.3.3.6 Past perfect / 92
2.3.3.3.3.7 Imperative and prohibitive / 93
2.3.3.3.3.8 Present subjunctive / 93
2.3.3.3.3.9 Past subjunctive / 94
2.3.3.3.3.10 Perfective counterfactual / 95
2.3.3.3.4 Periphrastic tense-aspect-mood expressions / 95
2.3.3.3.4.1 Progressive and immediacy ‘xerik + COP’ / 95
2.3.3.3.4.2 Future auxiliary / 96
2.3.3.3.4.2 TAM function of demonstrative complex / 97
2.3.3.3.4.3 Modality constructions / 98
2.3.4 Adjectives and adverbs / 98
2.3.4.1 Adjectives / 98
2.3.4.1.1 Basic adjectives / 99
2.3.4.1.1 Adjective derivation / 100
2.3.4.1.2 Comparison of adjectives / 102
2.3.4.2 Adverbs / 103
2.3.5 Minor word classes / 104
2.3.5.1 Pronouns / 104
2.3.5.1.1 Pronominal person markers / 104
2.3.5.1.2 Indefinite pronouns / 105
2.3.5.1.3 Impersonal pronouns / 107
2.3.5.1.4 Honorifics / 107
2.3.5.2 Deictics / 107
2.3.5.2.1 Demonstrative determiners and pronouns / 107
2.3.5.2.2 Adverbial demonstratives / 110
2.3.5.3 Adpositions / 111
2.3.5.3.1 Simple adpositions / 111
2.3.5.3.2 Absolute adpositions / 111
2.3.5.3.3 Compound adpositions / 112
2.3.5.3.4 Circumpositions / 113
2.3.5.4 Quantifiers and numerals / 114
2.3.5.4.1 Numerals / 114
2.3.5.4.2 Lexical quantifiers / 116
2.3.5.5 Classifiers / 117
2.3.5.6 Conjunctions and particles / 118
2.3.5.6.1 Conjunctions / 118
2.3.5.6.2 Discourse connectives / 118
2.3.5.6.3 Discourse particles / 119
2.3.5.6.4 Inteq'ections / 119
2.3.6 The syntax of the Noun Phrase / 119
2.3.6.1 Ezafe constructions / 120
2.3.6.1.1 Unmarked -f type NPs / 120
2.3.6.1.2 Compounding e-type NPs / 121
2.3.6.1.3 The particle de in ezafe constructions / 122
2.3.6.1.4 Multiple modification / 122
2.3.6.1.5 Independent/pronominal ezafe / 123
2.3.6.2 Adnominal possession / 123
2.3.6.3 Relative clauses / 124
2.3.7 Clausal Syntax / 125
2.3.7.1 Argument structure / 125
2.3.7.2 The order of arguments / 127
2.3.7.3 Topicalisation and focus / 129
2.3.7.4 Reflexive and reciprocal clauses / 132
2.3.7.5 Passive clauses / 133
2.3.7.5 Interrogative clauses / 133
2.3.7.5.1 Polar questions / 134
2.3.7.5.1 Content questions / 134
2.3.7.5.1 Rhetorical and tag questions / 136
2.3.7.6 Imperative clauses / 136
2.3.8 Complex sentences / 137
2.3.8.1 Serial verb henan / 137
2.3.8.2 Clause combining/coordination / 138
2.3.8.3 Subordination / 142
2.3.8.3.1 Complement clauses / 142
2.3.8.3.2 Conditional clauses / 143
2.3.8.3.3 Temporal adverbial clauses / 145
2.4 Summary of Mukri sketch grammar / 145

Chapter 3: Paradigms in the person marking system of Mukri Central Kurdish / 147
3.1 Introduction / 147
3.2 Person marking forms and paradigms / 148
3.2.1 Independent forms / 148
3.2.1.1 Case-based splits in independent forms / 152
3.2.1.2 Case-asymmetry / 154
3.2.2 Dependent forms / 157
3.2.2.1 Verbal affix person markers / 157
3.2.2.1.1 Verbal affix person markers of Seti / 158
3.2.2.1.2 Verbal affix person markers of Set2 / 160
3.2.2.2 Copular person markers 161
3.2.2.2.1 Allomorphy in 3SG copular ending / 164
3.2.2.3 Clitic Person Markers / 166
3.2.3 Summary of person marking paradigms / 170
3.3 Morphophonological status of person marker paradigms / 172
3.3.1 Review of clitics and clitichood in Kurdish and Iranian / 173
3.3.2 Review of the literature on clitichood / 177
3.3.3 Clitichood of mobile PMs / 182
3.3.3.1 Selection properties / 182
3.3.3.2 Combinatory gaps / 185
3.3.3.3 Morphological idiosyncrasies / 186
3.3.3.4 Semantic idiosyncrasies / 188
3.3.3.5 Syntactic behavior / 189
3.3.3.6 Word-external attachment properties / 194
3.3.3.7 Phonological versus non-phonological attachment of person forms / 197
3.3.3.7 Summary of morphophonological status of person forms / 198

Chapter 4: Syntax of person markers in Mukri Central Kurdish / 201
4.1 Introduction / 201
4.2 Overview of the literature on person agreement / 201
4.3 Functions of clitic person markers / 207
4.3.1 Clitic PMs indexing adnominal possessors / 208
4.3.2 Clitic PMs indexing objects in the present tense / 216
4.3.3 Clitic PMs indexing the A in past transitive constructions / 217
4.3.4 Clitic PMs indexing adpositional complements / 220
4.3.4.1 Non-local clitic PM complements of adpositions / 222
4.3.4.2 Clitic PM complementation of'absolute adpositions’ / 223
4.3.4.3 Clitic PM indexes enabled by verbal (directional) particle -e / 227
4.3.5 Clitic PMs indexing Indirect Participants / 230
4.3.6 Clitic PMs indexing non-canonical subjects / 232
4.3.6.1 Predicative possession (‘have’) on existential base he-1 ni- / 233
4.3.6.2 Necessity verb / 234
4.3.6.3 Emotion verbs / 235
4.3.6.4 Uncontrolled/non-volitional events and states / 236
4.3.6.5 Sound emission / 237
4.3.6.6 Potentiality expression / 239
4.3.7 Clitic PMs indexing locational/adverbial adjuncts / 241
4.3.8 Clitic PM occurrence frequencies / 242
4.3.9 Summary of functions of clitic person markers / 243
4.4 Verbal Affixes and copular endings in person agreement / 246
4.4.1 Argument-indexing via verbal affix and copular PMs in the present tense / 247
4.4.2 Argument-indexing via verbal affix/copular PMs in the past tense / 248
4.4.2.1 S-past marking / 249
4.4.2.2 O-past marking / 249
4.4.2.3 R-past marking / 257
4.4.2.4 T-past marking / 259
4.5 Patterns in person agreement in Mukri Kurdish / 262
4.5.1 Overview of agreement types and characteristics / 262
4.5.2 Mismatches in morphophonological form and agreement type / 265
4.5.3 Tense impact on argument indexing / 266
4.5.4 Alignment of grammatical relations in Mukri / 268
4.6 Summary of syntax of person markers 272

Chapter 5: Clitic placement in Mukri Central Kurdish / 274
5.1 Introduction / 274
5.2 Approaches to clitic placement / 275
5.2.1 Klavan’s (1985) parametric approach to clitic types / 275
5.2.2 Anderson’s (1993,2005) three-item typology / 277
5.3 Treatments of clitic placement in Central Kurdish and Iranian languages 280
5.3.1 Previous work on placement of clitic person markers in Kurdish / 280
5.3.2 Placement of clitic person markers in Iranian languages / 285
5.4 Describing clitic placement in Mukri Central Kurdish / 289
5.4.1 Cliticization in the NP domain: simple or special? / 290
5.4.2 Cliticization in the clause / 292
5.4.2.1 Placement of object-indexing clitics / 292
5.4.2.2 Placement of adpositional complement clitics / 296
5.4.2.3 Placement of A-past clitics / 302
5.4.2.4 Summary of clitic placement in the clause / 307
5.4.3 ‘Non-second’ positions: shortcomings of previous analyses / 307
5.4.4 Deriving the second-position for Mukri clitic PM placement / 311
5.4.4.1 Terms and conceptualizations in Prosodic Phonology / 312
5.4.4.2 ‘Second-position’ in the placement of Pashto clitics / 316
5.4.4.3 A prosodic account of clitic placement in Mukri Kurdish / 319
5.4.4.4 A constraint-based analysis of clitic placement in Mukri Kurdish / 325
5.4.5 Summary of principles of clitic placement in Mukri Kurdish / 329
5.4.6 Deviations from placement principles / 329
5.4.6.1 Hosts and non-hosts in clitic placement / 329
5.4.6.2 Information structure and clitic placement / 334
5.4.7 Synopsis of clitic placement principles in Mukri / 336
5.5 Summary of clitic placement in Mukri Central Kurdish / 337

Chapter 6: Clitic-Affix Interactions / 338
6.1 Introduction / 338
6.2 Functional shift from clitics to verbal affixes / 340
6.2.1 Licit clitic sequences / 341
6.2.1.1 Co-occurrence of a possessor clitic with other clitics / 341
6.2.1.2 Cooccurrence of 0 and R indexing clitics in the present tense constructions / 344
6.2.2 Illicit clitic sequences and clitic disformation / 347
6.2.2.1 External Possession / 347
6.2.2.2 External nominal complements / 349
6.2.2.3 Flagged external third-participants / 352
6.2.2.4 Direct arguments of the verb / 353
6.2.3 Shared traits of ‘disforming’ constructions / 355
6.2.4 Existing accounts on related phenomena in Central Kurdish / 357
6.2.5 Literature review on constraints on clitic sequencing / 362
6.2.5.1 Principles of OT / 363
6.2.5.2 Alignment constraints and cross-referencing types / 364
6.2.5.3 Sequencing clitics: restrictions and outcomes / 368
6.2.5.4 Morphosyntactic constraints determining the ordering in a cluster / 370
6.2.6 Accounting for the cluster-internal ordering in Mukri CK / 372
6.2.7 Interim summary: clitic disformation / 379
6.3 Cluster-internal ordering of clitics and affixes / 380
6.3.1 Statement of the problems in clitic-affix clusters / 381
6.3.2 Existing treatments of the relevant problem(s) in the literature on CK / 384
6.3.3 Morphophonological restrictions on clitic-affix sequences / 389
6.3.4 Accounting for the outcomes of clitic-affix concatenations in Mukri CK / 395
6.3.4.1 Cluster-internal ordering of clitics and affixes / 395
6.3.4.2 Idiosyncratic placement of 3SG A-PAST clitic / 401
6.3.4.3 Reverse disformation of 2SG verbal affix PM / 405
6.3.5 Summary of cluster-internal clitic-affix ordering / 408
6.4 Summary of clitic-affix interactions / 409

Chapter 7: Conclusions / 411
References / 416
Appendices / 427

List of Tables

Table 1. The corpus used in this study with metadata of the individual texts / 21
Table 2. Mukri vowel phonemes / 31
Table 3. Mukri consonant phonemes / 33
Table 4. Phoneme-grapheme associations / 47
Table 5. Copular person forms in Mukri / 59
Table 6. Case and number inflection / 75
Table 7. Past versus present stems of verbs in Mukri / 78
Table 8. Verbs derived by adverbial preverbs / 80
Table 9. Common light verb constructions in Mukri / 82
Table 10. Verbs derived by transitivizing suffix -and / 84

Table 11. Verbs derived by aspectual suffix -ewe / 85
Table 12. Aspect-mood and negation markers/forms in Mukri / 87
Table 13. Position and order of aspect-mood and negation prefixes / 88
Table 14 Verbal-tense functions of person markers in Mukri / 89
Table 15. Semantic property types of adjectives in Mukri / 99
Table 16. Semantic property types of adverbs in Mukri / 103
Table 17. Historical pronominal forms in Mukri CK / 105
Table 18. Indefinite pronouns in Mukri / 106
Table 19. Simple adpositions in Mukri / Ill
Table 20. Absolute adpositions and their correspondance with simple adpositions / 112

Table 21. Cardinal numbers in Mukri CK / 115
Table 22. The structure of the verbal clause and the common word order in Mukri / 129
Table 23 Independent person markers in Mukri Kurdish / 149
Table 24 Independent person markers in standard CK / 149
Table 25. Case-asymmetry in Mukri nominal and pronominal systems / 154
Table 26. Verbal affix person markers in Mukri / 157
Table 27. Copular person markers in Mukri / 162
Table 28. Negative copular forms in Mukri / 163
Table 29. Clitic person markers in Mukri / 166
Table 30. Person marking paradigms in Mukri / 170

Table 31. Feature encoding across paradigms of person markers / 171
Table 32. Mobile bound person markers in Mukri (repeated) / 172
Table 33. Affix vs. clitic status of PM sets in Mukri Central Kurdish / 199
Table 34. True adpositions in Mukri / 221
Table 35. Absolute prepositions in Mukri / 223
Table 36. Types of adpositions and their person form complements / 225
Table 37. Semantic roles encoded by clitic PM complements of adpositions / 227
Table 38. Frequency of occurrence of clitic PMs with respect to their function and person value / 242
Table 39. Clitic PM functions and accompanying syntactic features / 244
Table 40. Verbal affix and copular person markers in Mukri / 246

Table 41. O-past marking with respect to the overt controller in the clause / 255
Table 42. Person and other features in R-past marking / 261
Table 43. Argument-indexing and typology of agreement in Mukri / 263
Table 44. Tense-based alternations in marking of the arguments / 267
Table 45. Clitic placement typology in Klavans (1985) / 276
Table 46 Clitic types with respect to the syntactic status of their host / 279
Table 47. Constructions leading to the disformation of a clitic PM / 356
Table 48. Clitic-affix ordering with a İSG A-past clitic person marker / 395
Table 49. Clitic-affix ordering with a 3PL A-past / 396
Table 50. Verbal Affix PMs in Mukri (simplified) / 397

Table 51. Clitic-affix ordering with 3SG A-past / 401
Table 52. Expected/canonical ordering of 3SG A-past with Vaff PMs (not attested) / 402
Table 53. The morphophonological shape of clitic-affix combinations / 403

List of Figures

Figure 1. The speech zone of Mukri within Kurdish and neighboring languages / 2
Figure 2. The page recording the information on L. O. Fossom’s Bible translation into Mukri Kurdish in 1919 / 12
Figure 3. Fieldwork localities in Mukriyan region of North-west Iran / 15
Figure 4. Types of agreement and their relationship with types of agreement markers / 205
Figure 5. Morphophonological realization of agreement types and agreement markers / 265
Figure 6. Prosodic structure of cliticization and possible clitic types / 313
Figure 7. Prosodic structure of cliticization in the pre-verbal domain / 319
Figure 8. Prosodic structure of cliticization on inflected verb stems / 321
Figure 9. Prosodic structure of cliticization preverbs / 322
Figure 10. Prosodic structure of cliticization on the modal/aspectual formative de- / 325

ABSTRACT

The person-marking system of Central Kurdish, with a complex set of person-marker paradigms, presents a number of problems, especially in the manners in which different person-marker paradigms are distributed for argument-indexing. For instance, a pronominal complement of an adposition might be a person form from the paradigm of clitic person markers in a present-tense construction, but the formal expression of the same argument is switched to a verbal affix person marker in a past-tense construction. Previous scholarship (Bynon 1979; Samvelian 2007; Haig 2008; Jügel 2009) has pointed to the relevant phenomena and provided important descriptive facts, but a comprehensive treatment of the problem and an inclusive explanation to possible structural motivations behind it are still lacking. Exploration of this specific problem of the morphosyntax of Central Kurdish requires a thorough analysis of its person-marking system. Hence, in this study, morphophonological status of respective person marking paradigms is established and argumentindexing function of person-marker paradigms are thoroughly investigated, showing striking deviations from the dominant cross-linguistic tendencies in associating ‘grammatical agreement’ with affixes and ‘pronominal agreement’ or ‘cross-reference’ with ‘clitics’ (Siewierska 2004). A novel analysis of clitic placement in Central Kurdish is proposed whereby a clitic is considered to be occurring systematically following a prosodic word. The occurrence of clitic person markers on hosts of diverse syntactic and morphological status, such as syntactic phrases, morphological words and verbal inflectional morphemes (i.e. ‘endocliticisis’, cf. Samvelian 2007) is reduced to differences in the type of cliticization (Selkirk 1995). The formal switch from a clitic to a verbal affix person marker in the expression of a number of arguments is analysed as occurring for avoiding certain clitic combinations (Gerlach 2002) since the latter inevitably leads to an improperly placed clitic. A number of other problems relating to seeminlgy non-clitic-like and/or idiosyncratic manifestations of clitic person markers are explained through a closer investigation of the prosodic structure of the forms in question and within larger constraints (Prince and Smolensky 1993; Yip 1998) of expressing the intended arguments by preserving distinct morphological and phonological identity of the person forms in question.

Keywords: person marking, agreement, clitic placement, clitic-affix combinations, prosodic phonology, constraint hierarchy

Résumé

Le système de marquage personnel du kurde central, avec un ensemble complexe de paradigmes personnels, présenté un bon nombre de problèmes, notamment dans la manière dont les paradigmes personnels sont distribués dans l’indexation des arguments. Par exemple, un enclitique personnel qui marque 1’actant oblique, construit avec une préposition dans les constructions au présent, devient un affixe personnel dans les constructions à la passe. D’autres actants sont affectés par des alternances comparables. Les recherches précédentes (Bynon 1979 ; Samvelian 2007 ; Haig 2008 ; Jügel 2009) ont mis en évidence les phénomènes pertinents, mais un traitement global du problème et une explication générale des motivations derrière le phénomène font encore défaut. L’investigation de ce problème spécifique de la morphosyntaxe du kurde central requiert une analyse globale du système de marquage personnel de la langue. Ainsi, nous établissons le statut morphophonologie des paradigmes des personnes et nous examinons en détail le fonctionnement des marques de personnes, en indiquant des déviations intéressantes par rapport aux tendances typologiques qui favoriser l’accord grammatical avec des formes affixales et l’expression pronominale avec les clitiques (Siewierska 2004). Nous proposons une nouvelle analyse du positionnement des enclitiques mobiles en kurde centrale en termes de phonologie prosodique (Selkirk 1995; Truckenbrodt 1999 ; Anderson, 2005) selon laquelle une forme de personne enclitique apparait systématiquement après la première phrase phonologique (ou mot prosodique) dans le domaine du syntagme verbal. L’altèrnance formelle d’un enclitique personnel et d’un affixe personnel est considère comme le résultat des restrictions sur les combinaisons des enclitiques, lesquelles conduisent nécessairement â un mauvais positionnement de l'un des clitiques de la combinaison. L’altèrnance formelle de l'un des clitiques en affixe personnel permet d'éviter une combinaison de clitiques (Gerlach 2002), ce qui conduit â un positionnement correct des morphèmes de personnes. D’autres problèmes du système des marques de personnes sont expliqués grâce â un examen plus approfondi des faits de prosodies et par une série de contraintes plus générâtes de la langue (Prince and Smolensky 1993 ; Yip 1998) qui favorisent l’expression des actants en maintenant distincte l’identité morphologique et phonologique des marques de personnes lorsqu’elles sont en combinaison.

Mots-clés : marquage personnel, accord, positionnement des enclitiques, combinaisons clitiques- affixes, phonologie prosodique, hiérarchie des contraintes

Acknowledgmenets

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many people and institutions who have provided me with their help, support and encouragement during the four years of my life as a doctoral student in Paris and Bamberg.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Prof. François Jacquesson and Prof. Geoffrey Haig for the time and care they waged upon my research. I benefited greatly from their constructive criticism and meticulous guidance. I do not claim to have done justice to the quality of their instructions in my dissertation but I hope I have clearly shown that the societal and situational context of language production cannot be separated from the language as the object of linguistic analysis. In addition to instructing me in fieldwork methods and providing most elaborate comments on more general linguistic dimensions of my work, Prof. Jacquesson taught me also to reflect on what is usually presented as ‘given’ and to be reflexive also on the very language through which linguistic analyses are carried on. He additionally exercised considerable patience with the administrative paperwork of my research, scholarship and residence in France. Prof. Haig was extremely responsive to my questions from the very beginning and he carefully commented on all the different versions of my work. His commitment to conducting serious international research on Iranian languages and more specifically on Kurdish, without considering them as mere ‘data’, has been my main inspiration in pursuing studies on Kurdish linguistics. This dissertation would not have come to completion without the help and support of my two supervisors.

I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Professors Claude Hagège, Agnes Korn, Annie Montaut, Pollet Samvelian and Frank Seifart.
I received the scholarship for my doctoral research from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by the intermediary of Kurdish Institute of Paris. I am grateful to both of the institutions for having provided me with this opportunity and, in general, for assuring this service for the advancement of Kurdish Studies. I would like to express my gratitude to my research institution Laboratories des Langues et Civilisations â Tradition Orale (LACITO), UMR7107 of CNRS. LACITO provided me with an office and logistic support during my studies while it is also thanks to the generous grants from LACITO that I have been able to conduct fieldwork during three trips to Iranian Kurdistan. I am grateful also for the support I received from my two universities, Doctoral School 268 of Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in France and University of Bamberg in Germany.

I was also fortunate to be surrounded by my teachers and colleagues at LACITO, of whom I would like to mention especially Evangelia Adamou, Alexandre François, Benjamin Taouti, Patrycja Matera, Lameen Souag, San San Hnin Tun, Sarnia Nairn, Agnes Henri, Claire Moyse- Faurie, Isabelle Bril, Severine Guillaume, Camille Simon, Anne Behaghel-Dindorf, Anisa Forget. Jean-Michel Roynard deserves a separate thank for the patience with which he helped me in technical matters of fonts and formatting. Christian Chanard from LLACAN was always available for fixing my problems with Toolbox. Jerome Picard from CNRS de Villejuif spent a good while charting the maps for I wish to thank also Diana Forker from Bamberg University, who, in addition to sparing time for my general linguistic questions, shared also her office with me during my visits in Bamberg. Alexandra Wolf from Welcome Center at Bamberg University has been extremely kind and helpful in orienting me in Bamberg. I would also like to seize the opportunity to express my gratitude to my former professors Salih Akin and Laurent Gosselin from Université de Rouen and Meltem Kelepir, Balkız Öztürk, Senem Yıldız and Didar Akar from Boğaziçi University.

Like all of the studies in descriptive Linguistics based on fieldwork, this research also owes a great deal to the native speakers, in my case, to the people of Mukriyan. My heartfelt thanks to my hosts and informants Selah Payanyani and Mihemed Sarewanani, together with their families, who helped me with unfailing patience in all respects of a relatively long fieldwork. When I set out to Mukriyan, I was thinking that I would be doing a great favor to the study of the oral literature of the region - in addition to its dialect -, yet I found that many talented reserachers who were grown up in that culture had already taken up extensive high quality work on oral literature. I was lucky to be friends with many of them. Many of those friends in Mehabad, Nexede and Şino might prefer to remain anonymous, yet I would like to mention at least their first names, as a futile effort to acknowledge their help and friendship: kak (Mr.) Rehber, mam (uncle) Qadir, mam Osman, kak Mustefa, kak Ehmed, kak Süleyman, kak Rehman, kak Mustefa, kak Suad, kak Sakar, kak Mensur, kak Naşir, kak Suware, kak İbrahim.
I did not face the famous housing problems in Paris thanks to my dear friend and landlady Nausica Baillot. Living in the seventh floor of 31 Bd Arago has been fun and enriching thanks to my flatmates Camille, Xavier, Helen, and Adnan, respectively from the first to the fourth year. The insistently gloomy sky of Paris has been bearable thanks to many friends with whom I have had extensive social and intellectual interaction during all these years, to name only a few of them: Serra, Kawa, Yilmaz, Mesud, Malek, Louise, Metin, Rojda, Romu, Serdar, Qedri, Tahir, Cuma, Weli, Apo, Shushan, Alâra, Luis. My friends from Istanbul years and others supported my diasporic adventure despite the distance, to mention only a few of them: Şerif, Metin, Akif, Onur, Kathy, Kelda, Erol, Ergin, Salih, Neşe, Songül, Jana, Güle, Serhed, Receb, Murat, Kawa, Yonca, Elîxan, Erdal.

It would be a shame to forget the many authors who kept pleasant company during my four Parisian years: Cesar Aira, Antonio Tabucchi, Pascal Quignard, Italo Calvino, Roberto Bolano, Murat Gülsoy, Raymond Carver, Witold Gombrowicz, Kawa Nemir, Birhan Keskin, Etgar Keret, Fawaz Husen, Leylâ Erbil, Bernard Quiriny. May their glory cover the earth!
My heartfelt thanks also to Isabella Nova and Pişîlî who would pull me out of the cryptic world of clitics when working was no more useful. Isa’s cheerful company and Pişîlî’s reckless demands of attention and food left me with no other way than observing some balance between the work and the life.

My parents, Bedirye and Casim, and the rest of my large family have been those who have supported me the most since I set out to study away from them many years ago. Now that I am approaching the end of my studious student life, I will make sure to spend enough time among them.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This thesis is a description and analysis of person-marking system of the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish. It is a typologically oriented study in descriptive and documentary linguistics. In this introductory chapter I provide background information on the language and the corpus of the study. I start with presenting in general terms the language and its speech community, considering also its main sociolinguistic aspects (§1.1). Although this is not a work in dialectology, I discuss briefly the position of Mukri within Kurdish dialectology (§1.2). Then I provide a synopsis of previous work on Mukri and more generally on Central Kurdish linguistics (§1.3). In §1.4, I present a fairly detailed description of my fieldwork and data collection process. Then in §1.5,1 describe the database and the corpus of this study as well as the methodological aspects of its composition and handling. Finally, in the last section (§1.6), the questions and goals of this study are stated and a detailed narrative table of contents ends the chapter.

1.1 Mukri Central Kurdish and its speech community

Mukri (more precisely Mukri) or Mukriyani is the indigenous name for the variety of Central Kurdish1 spoken in the northern half of Central Kurdish speech area in Iran. The Figure 1 shows the speech zone of Mukri within Central Kurdish and with respect to other contact languages. Mahabad (called also as Sablax2), the historical and current sociopolitical center of the region, is the principal city of the dialect area. Other important towns that make up the dialect zone of Mukri are Bokan, Sardasht, Piranshahr, Nexede, Shino and Miyandoab. The only statistics are from Lewis (2009) (see fn. 1), estimating the number of Central Kurdish speakers in Iran as 3,250,000.

1 Central Kurdish or more widely Sorani Kurdish is one of the principal Kurdish varieties spoken in Iraq and Iran, by the majority of Kurdish population in these two countries. We are not aware of any academic sources citing the number of its speakers, but Lewis [Ethnologue] (2009) estimates its population as 6,750,000 speakers.

2 It comes from Sauj-boulagh (or Saudj-boulagh, Sauj-bulaq), originally a Turkic name, which was replaced by Mahabad (or Mehabad) during the nationalist Pahlavi regime (see Minorsky 1957:65), more precisely in 1935 (Vali 2011:26).

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Ergin Öpengin

Clitic-affix interactions a corpus-based study of person marking
in the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
Clitic-affix interactions a corpus-based study of person marking
in the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish
Ergin Öpengin

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
ED 268 “Langage et langues : description, théorisation, transmission”
UMR 7107 - Langues et Civilisations â Tradition Orale (LACITO)

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
Institut für Orientalistik, Lehrstuhl Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

Thèse de doctorat en sciences du langage
Doctoral thesis in Linguistics
Ergin Öpengin

Clitic-affix interactions
A corpus-based study of person marking
in the Mukri variety of Central Kurdish

Les interactions clitiques-affixes
Etude de corpus sur le marquage des personnes
dans la variété Mukri du kurde central

Thèse de doctorat en cotutelle intemationale dirigée par
Prof. Geoffrey Haig
Prof. François Jacquesson

Soutenue le 16 Septembre 2013
Defended on September 16, 2013

Jury
M. Claude Hagege, Professeur, College de France
M. Geoffrey Haig, Professeur, Universitât Bamberg, Directeur de thèses
M. François Jacquesson, Directeur de Recherche, CNRS, Directeur de Thèse
Mme. Agnes Korn, Professeur, Goethe Universitât Frankfurt am Main
Mme. Annie Montaut, Professeur, INALCO
Mme. Pollet Samvelian, Professeur, Üniversite Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
M. Frank Seifart, Senior Researcher, Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig)