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Post-Predicate Constituents in Kurdish
This chapter investigates the areal distribution of post-predicate constituents across Kurdish, primarily based on the MDKD. Although direct objects are rarely postposed, certain other constituents regularly follow the predicate, yielding an OVX word order. Semantics appears to be the best predictor for post-predicate placement: those constituents which express the endpoints of a state of affairs are overwhelmingly post-predicate, across all dialects (GOALs and RECIPIENTs), while the placement of ADDRESSEEs varies, basically according to a south-east vs. the rest split in Northern Kurdish. Other locational phrases, with no implication of movement, are overwhelmingly pre-predicate. The chapter maps the areal tendencies, assesses the relevance of different theoretical approaches in accounting for OVX in Kurdish, and considers its possible historical sources.
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.