This chapter surveys the forms of case marking across the dialects of Kurdish, as represented in the MDKD. Structural and non-structural (semantic) cases are expressed through a range of different exponents: adpositions (pre-, post- and circumpositions), morphological case, and word-order properties. Structural cases are invariably non-adpositional across all dialects, with the major isogloss separating those dialects that make use of the Oblique case, which include all of Northern Kurdish and a few dialects of Central Kurdish, from those that have lost it. The marking of semantic cases is subject to considerable areal variation, following an approximate north/south cline with prepositional marking increasingly dominant in the south. The findings are illustrated with data from the MDKD, supplemented with reference to other major sources.
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Gorani (Gawraju)
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.
Word order in Mukri Kurdish – the case of incorporated targets
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.