Ezafe Construction Research Articles

Ezafe in Zazaki

This chapter describes the Ezafe construction in Zazaki in which all nominal and non-nominal modifiers, including possessors, appear in the postnominal position and are linked to their head noun with the Ezafe marker. Ezafe in this language displays distinguishing properties such that it not only inflects for the phi-features and the definiteness of the head noun, but it also reflects the case that the whole noun phrase receives in the clause. The Direct and Oblique case distinctions observed in this language are thus reflected on the Ezafe forms in relevant syntactic positions. Besides, there is a separate series of Ezafe forms, which we refer to as D-forms, used only in Southern Zazaki whenever a modified noun phrase serves as the possessor or as the complement of certain adpositions, or after the indefinite suffix in the context of indefiniteness.

Pollet Samvelian. “Specific Features of Persian Syntax: The Ezafe construction, differential object marking, and complex predicates”

Ce chapitre du volume collectif The Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (voir le cr du volume dans ce meme numero) traite trois points de syntaxe : la construction avec ezâfe, le marquage differentiel de l’objet et les predicats complexes ; trois questions au sujet desquelles l’A. souligne d’emblee l’importance, aussi bien pour le persan que pour la typologie, que les donnees du persan sont par la meme occasion susceptibles d’eclairer. Chacune d’elles est detaillee dans un expose clair et ...

ТЮРКІЗМИ В ТОПОНІМІЇ УКРАЇНИ: ІСТОРИКО-ЕТИМОЛОГІЧНИЙ АСПЕКТ

Багатовікові контакти тюркських племен і народів з корінним населенням України широко відбилися в її топонімії, у якій тюркізми становлять одну з найчисельніших груп з-поміж іншомовних географічних назв. Вони закріплювалися в місцевому мовленні протягом трьох основних періодів: 1) київськоруського (давньоукраїнського) — ІХ-ХІІІ ст. (ур. і р. Єрєль < тюрк. аірілі/аірылы «розділений», калька д.рус. Оуголъ < уголъ «кут; клин землі між річками, що сходяться»); 2) староукраїнського — ХІV-ХVІІІ ст. (терит. Буджак < тур. budžak «вугол»); 3) новоукраїнського (сучасного) — ХІХ-ХХІ ст. (м. Джанкой < тур. джан «новий» і кой «село, поселення»). Етимологія тюркських топонімів відбиває: внутрішні властивості географічних об’єктів (р. Аджигόль < аджи «киснути, бродити» і гол/голь «озеро, водойма»); відношення об’єктів номінації rо інших (переважно суміжних) реалій навколишньої місцевості (м. Кіліr < кіл «різновид вибільних глин» + суф. -лі/-лій у релятивній функції); відношення об’єктів до людини (м. Ізмаḯл < чол. ім’я Ismail як колишній атрибутив в ізафетній конструкції). Похідні кожного з цих принципів номінації можуть виражати конотативне значення, пов’язане з культурно-історичними цінностями або сакральними уявленнями (р. Бéшка < тюрк. bes/beš «п’ять», сакральне значення «богом дана множинність» і kaja «скеля»), які могли проникати і в контактне українське мовлення (пор. назву м. П’ятихáтки, що виникла під тюркським культурологічним впливом). В останній (сучасний) період тюркський вплив на географічні назви зберігався головним чином у слов’янізованому Криму, де з’являлися топоніми здебільшого кримськотатарського походження, але в радянські часи на півострові, як і в усій Україні, більшість іншомовних назв (переважно ойконіми та урбаноніми), у тому числі і тюркських, була вольовим способом замінена.

Revisiting the Persian Ezafe construction: A roll-up movement analysis

This paper explores the Persian Ezafe construction, a construction which has received significant attention in the syntactic literature in the past few decades. Descriptively, Ezafe is an unstressed vowel -e (-ye after vowels) which appears between a noun and its modifier (N-e Mod), and is repeated on subsequent modifiers, if they are present, except the last one (N-e Mod1-e Mod2-e Mod3). This paper takes a fresh look at the distribution of the Ezafe vowel, with a special emphasis on its correlation with the order of elements in the noun phrase. After the close connection between word order and the absence/presence of Ezafe is established, the paper considers alternative ways this relation can be captured and argues for a roll-up movement account of this construction, which takes the base order of the noun phrase in Persian to be head final, with the surface order derived via phrasal movement to specifiers of intermediate functional projections in a roll-up fashion. In developing and arguing for this analysis, we will also have a closer look at several constructions in Persian, such as the superlative and the colloquial definite marker, and will account for various word order restrictions in the Persian noun phrase.

A Hybrid Algorithm for Recognizing the Position of Ezafe Constructions in Persian Texts

Abtract — In the Persian language, an Ezafe construction is a linking element which joins the head of a phrase to its modifiers. The Ezafe in its simplest form is pronounced as –e, but generally not indicated in writing. Determining the position of an Ezafe is advantageous for disambiguating the boundary of the syntactic phrases which is a fundamental task in most natural language processing applications. This paper introduces a framework for combining genetic algorithms with rule-based models that brings the advantages of both approaches and overcomes their problems. This framework was used for recognizing the position of Ezafe constructions in Persian written texts. At the first stage, the rulebased model was applied to tag some tokens of an input sentence. Then, in the second stage, the search capabilities of the genetic algorithm were used to assign the Ezafe tag to untagged tokens using the previously captured training information. The proposed framework was evaluated on Peykareh corpus and it achieved 95.26 percent accuracy. Test results show that this proposed approach outperformed other approaches for recognizing the position of Ezafe constructions.

Lessons from building a Persian written corpus: Peykare

This paper addresses some of the issues learned during the course of building a written language resource, called `Peykare', for the contemporary Persian. After defining five linguistic varieties and 24 different registers based on these linguistic varieties, we collected texts for Peykare to do a linguistic analysis, including cross-register differences. For tokenization of Persian, we propose a descriptive generalization to normalize orthographic variations existing in texts. To annotate Peykare, we use EAGLES guidelines which result to have a hierarchy in the part-of-speech tags. To this aim, we apply a semi-automatic approach for the annotation methodology. In the paper, we also give a special attention to the Ezafe construction and homographs which are important in Persian text analyses.

A (phrasal) affix analysis of the Persian Ezafe

This paper discusses the status of the Ezafe particle -(y)ein Persian and provides an affixal analysis of the Ezafe, formalized within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The Ezafe, a feature of certain Western Iranian languages, is realized as an enclitic and links the head noun to its modifiers and to the possessor NP. The latter follow the head and are linked to one another by the Ezafe. On the basis of crucial empirical facts that have never been discussed in previous studies, I argue that the Ezafe is best regarded as an affix attaching to nominal heads (nouns, adjectives and some prepositions), as well as to nominal intermediate projections, and marking them as expecting a modifier or a direct nominal complement. Viewed as such, the Ezafe construction is an instance of the head-marked pattern of morphological marking of grammatical relations. This analysis differs from all previous accounts of the Ezafe (i.e. as case-marker, syntactic or phonological linker) and entails that the Ezafe, which originated in the Old Iranian relative particle -hya, has undergone a process of reanalysis-grammaticalization, to end up as a part of nominal morphology.

Kurdish Ezafe construction: Implications for DP structure

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.

A Note on Parasitic Gaps and Specificity

I am grateful to Andrew Barss, Molly Diesing, Jaklin Kornfilt, Anne Lobeck, Richard Oehrle, Rudy Troike, and two LI reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 The dialect under discussion in this squib is the standard Tehrani dialect spoken in Iran. 2 The particle rci, which appears as o and ro in the colloquial language, marks an NP for specificity (Karimi 1990). Elsewhere I have suggested that it is the head of a functional projection that takes an NP as its complement (Karimi 1996). This analysis concerns the internal structure of the specific object and does not affect the phrase structure rules provided in (27). 3Abbreviations: SG = singular, SUBJ = subjunctive, HAB = habitual, PART = particle, PL = plural, NEG = negation, PRED = predicate, EZ = Ezafe particle. An Ezafe construction is an NP consisting of the head (an element with the feature [+ N]), its modifier(s), an optional possessive NP, and the Ezafe particle e that is structurally utilized as a link between the head and its modifier(s). See Samiian 1983, 1994, Karimi and Brame 1986, and Ghomeshi 1997 for discussion.

Non-Projecting Nouns and the Ezafe: Construction in Persian

With the advent of functional as well as lexical structure within the noun phrase, there exists much syntactic structure that appears to be unused. While there has been discussion as to which inflectional categories project structure, the question of whether lexical categories project has not been raised. In this paper it is claimed that common nouns in Persian do not project to maximal categories, i.e. do not appear with a complement and a specifier position. Several facts follow as a consequence. First, we explain an intriguing property of the Ezafe construction in Modern Persian, namely that all modifiers of nouns must be heads themselves. We also have an explanation for the presence of the Ezafe vowel itself, which is analyzed as a linker affixed to X0s at PF to identify elements forming a nominal constituent. Finally, we explain why only one possessor is possible within Persian noun phrases. Since nouns cannot project complement and specifier positions, the only position available for a possessor is [SPEC, DP].

Eine historisch-typologische Analyse der Konstruktion ime motër/sestra mi/soră-mea

Summary The present work represents a historical-typological investigation of the constructional type ime motër/cecmpa Mu/soră-mea, named “the kinship type”, especially including the relations of the type to the superior type motra ime/Moama cccmpa/sora mea: The phonetical, morphosyntactial, lexical and sentential characteristic features of this subtype in the Balkan languages Albanian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian together with Italian are discussed. The Albanian construction e motra is explicated as a typological parallel to a certain type of ezafe construction in Iranian, and a theory is advanced on the preposing of the Albanian copulative article (which is interpreted us a marker of relativisation on par with the ezafe article) under an ellipsis of presupposition.