Pronominal Clitics in North and South Bashāgardi; A Typological Analysis

Abstract

From past decades, the study of “clitic”, as a dependent and intermediate element that simultaneously represents some shared properties of the two morpheme types - “free word” and “affix”, has been the center of attention for different linguistic approaches as well as the investigation issue for scholars from different linguistic fields. Among them, by focusing on distinctive features as well as discovering and proposing universal parameters for clitics, language typologists have also played a crucial role in identifying, analyzing and explaining their typological behavior and, as a result, have paved very effective steps in developing the studies for this challenging linguistic unit. Considering the determinant position and the undeniable importance of analyzing under-studied linguistic variants in typological surveys, the present study tries to evaluate and analyze the North and South Bashāgardi pronominal clitics based on Aikhenvald’s (2003) typological model and universal parameters, and hence, to achieve a theoretical explanation for their typological nature, characteristics, tendencies and behavior. To this end, the research intended linguistic corpus was collected in a natural environment of language use by fieldwork method and via questionnaires, translating selected structures and sentences, and recording the free speech of eight (five men and three women) native, middle-plus aged, illiterate, and permanent resident informants, and then was transcribed and analyzed. According to the authors’ initial hypothesis, the nature, tendencies, and behavior of the investigated elements in Bashāgardi are compatible with Aikhenvald (2003)’s proposed universals for clitics. In like manner, the research findings overtly show that the clitics’ universal properties and typological behaviors and tendencies, such as freedom in host selection, non-correlation with phonological words, correlation with syntactic words, appearance after all affix types, and having phonological coherence, idiosyncratic phonotactics, segmental structure, syntactic order, syntactic domain and syntactic rules are implemented in Bashāgardi clitics along with possible theoretical explanations for those properties and tendencies. As a result, the typological parameters of the documented research model maximally approve the authors’ hypothesis and hence, the clitichood of all the studied elements.