In Mukri Kurdish, Targets (e.g., Goals of MOTION verbs, Recipients of GIVE verbs and Addressees of SAY verbs) can appear inside the verbal complex, which is referred to as the ‘incorporated position’. The characteristics of this special word order are analyzed based on fieldwork and published data of narrative free speech as well as experimental crowdsourced data (since 2016). Through corpus analysis, I examine morphosyntactic, semantic, discoursepragmatic and cognitive factors that trigger word ordering. The results show that the incorporated position in Mukri is different from other positions in terms of syntactic dependency length, animacy and adjacency of verb + non-verbal elements. Nevertheless, the incorporated position can be seen as a variant of the preverbal position.
Archives
Noun-plus-verb complex predicates in Kurmanji Kurdish
Complex predicates (CPs) consisting of a noun (N) and a verb (V) are an ubiquitous feature of Kurdish, and of Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages generally. Mohanan (1997) has proposed an argument-sharing analysis for this type of CP in Hindi, according to which both the noun and the verb contribute to the argument structure of the CP In this paper the argument-sharing approach is assessed against the Kurdish data, but it transpires that it only accounts for a subset of N-FV CPs. Furthermore, for one specific type of CR an analysis in terms of syntactic incorporation is simpler and empirically more adequate. I conclude that no single model accounts for the totality of CP-formation in Kurdish and related languages. Finally, I address the question of why N+V CPs should have emerged in the eastern members of Indo-European, yet are almost completely lacking in the Indo-European languages of Europe.