Kurdish Ezafe construction: Implications for DP structure

Abstract

In this paper, we will try to shed new light on the ‘ Ezafe’ construction in Kurdish. 1 1 The Kurdish dialect under discussion is called ‘ Sorani’ which is spoken in the Kurdish areas across the border of Iran and Iraq limited to Kurdistan and Azarbaijan-e Gharbi provinces in Iran and Suleymania and Arbil provinces in Iraq. The following abbreviations are used in this paper: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, ACC = accusative, CMPR = comparative, CONJ = conjunction, DEF = definite(ness), EZ = Ezafe, GEN = genitive, INDEF = indefinite(ness), INFX = interfix, MS = masculine, NOM = nominative, PASS = passive, PL = plural, PrC = predicate construction, PsC = possessive construction, RC = relative clause, RP = relative pronoun, SG = singular. Drawing on historical facts and tracing the Ezafe back to its origins on the one hand, and the unified relation of adjectives and possessors to the head nouns, namely modification, on the other hand, we will argue for the existence of the predicate phrase which Ezafe realizes its head above the NP. The occurrence of the Ezafe will be attributed to the presence of such a functional head which serves to turn a property expression, assigned to the modifier constituent XP, into a propositional function which in turn needs to be saturated by an argument, that is the head noun. Extending the syntactic realization of predication from clausal domain to nominal domain is part of a broader project, which aims at further assimilation of the structure of DPs to clauses.