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 | 
