Typological analysis of Ilami Kurdish verbs of motion

Abstract

AbstractThis paper attempts to assess motion events in Ilami Kurdish through Talmy’s binary typology (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.),Language typology and lexical descriptions: Vol. 3. Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000a.Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 1: Concept structuring system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2000b.Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. 2: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) according to which, languages could be classified as “Satellite-framed” or “Verb-framed”. Following Berman and Slobin’s approach (1994.Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) in using “The Frog Story”, which paved the way for evaluating numerous languages in terms of their motion verbs, we used this elicitation tool for gathering Kurdish data. Results reveal that Ilami tends towards Satellite-framed languages as the concept of Path is often expressed by the use of satellites. As far as analysis of Path in Kurdish is taken into account, this concept has been analyzed with the help of different criteria proposed by Ibarretxe-Antuñano (2008. Path salience in motion events. In Jiansheng Gu, Elena Lieven, Nancy Budwig, Susan Ervin Tripp, Keiko Nakamura & Şeyda Özçalışkan (eds.),Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, 403–414. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) and typologically compared with other languages too. It seems that in addition to the oral nature of Ilami and its contact with Persian language, “the syntactic sensitivity of satellites” as a new motivation, also affects the amount of details accompanying the Path concept in this dialect.