|
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).
….. |
