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 ...