Archives

WOWA — Word Order in Western Asia

Kommentare deaktiviert für WOWA — Word Order in Western Asia

The focus on Western Asia is motivated by an overarching research interest in the areal diffusion of word order regularities; specifically, we investigate the respective impact of inheritance (the genetic affiliation of the languages concerned, e.g. Turkic, Semitic, etc.) and the impact of neighbouring languages, related or not, in shaping word order in usage. In addition, we address the issue of which aspects of word order are stable within a particular doculect, and which display corpus-internal variability.

More generally, this is connected to the issue of integrating variation into typology. Finally, WOWA is the only cross-linguistic data-base of its type that includes exclusively spoken language, and thus provides an important corrective to much ongoing work in corpus-based typology, which is still largely based on written language.

Differential case marking on adpositional complements in Zazakî

Kommentare deaktiviert für Differential case marking on adpositional complements in Zazakî

Research Questions of this thesis:

1) Under which circumstances do adpositional complements receive oblique
case marking?
2) Is animacy the sole determining factor or does definiteness play a role as
well?
3) Are there any regional differences for above-mentioned determiners?

For this purpose, 25 speakers of Zazakî have been interviewed using a translation task questionnaire that tests a subset of frequent adpositions with animate and inanimate nouns in different states of referentiality (definite or indefinite). Due to reasons of scope, the research at hand focuses on the Northern Dialect of the regions Dêrsim (Tunceli), Gimgim (Varto), and to some extent Qoçgîrî. After
introducing the language, its speakers, the numerous existing ethnonyms and glossonyms in Section 2, a theoretical overview of adpositional case marking, also known as flagging, are given both in a general sense and for Zazakî in particular in Section 3. Furthermore, the various effects of animacy and definiteness on differential case marking are examined. Section 4 describes the scope and methods of data gathering, the questionnaire design, and data evaluation necessary to address the research questions. The final results and a discussion are offered in Section 5. The results show the effects of animacy and definiteness per each adposition and complement before presenting the concluding remarks in Section 6.