Abstract
The clitic status of person markers in Sorani Kurdish
Highlights
The ambiguous nature of clitics challenges simple distinctions between morphology and syntax (Spencer & Luís, 2012)
We observed that Sorani Kurdish has two sets of person markers
The other set of person markers has been described as an oblique pronominal clitic and descends from Middle Iranian clitics that were derived from independent pronouns
Summary
The ambiguous nature of clitics challenges simple distinctions between morphology and syntax (Spencer & Luís, 2012). Atlamaz and Baker (in press) provide the examples in (1) from the Adıyaman dialect of Kurmanji Kurdish Both the intransitive and transitive verbs are marked for agreement with their subject.. Transitive verbs in Sorani use the direct suffix to cross-reference its subject in the imperfective aspect and its object in the perfective aspect. Accounts of ergativity for the Indo-Iranian languages focus on the tense-based subject marking on transitive verbs (c.f. Atlamaz and Baker, in press). The perfective alignment is ergative because the oblique marker is only used to cross-reference the subject of transitive verbs This split reflects the patterns found across the Indo-Iranian languages. The interaction of the Sorani person markers with verb transitivity and tense, as well as the movement of the oblique person forms to direct objects and negation provide the challenges for our analysis
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