Full Description
This book offers the first comparative discussion of variation in selected areas of structure in the dialects of Kurdish. The contributions draw on data collected as part of the project on Structural and Typological Variation in Kurdish and stored in the Manchester Database of Kurdish Dialects online resource, as well as on additional data sources. The chapters address issues in lexicon, phonology, and morpho-syntax including nominal case, tense and aspect categories, pronominal clitics, adpositions, word order (with special reference to post-predicate constituents) and connectivity and complex clauses. The materials that inform the analysis consist of a systematic questionnaire-based elicitation covering key features of variation in lexicon and morpho-syntax, and an accompanying corpus of free speech recordings, collected in over 120 locations across the Kurdish-speaking regions in Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran and covering mainly the dialects of Northern and Central Kurdish (Kurmani-Bahdini and Sorani), with some consideration of Southern Kurdish. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields such as linguistics, linguistic typology, Iranian linguistics and linguistics of the Middle East, and dialectology.
Contents
1. Introduction; Yaron Matras, Geoffrey Haig, Ergin Öpengin.- 2. Lexical Variation And Semantic Change Across Kurdish; Jaffer Sheyholislami And Rahim Surkhi.- 3. Phonological Variation In Kurdish; Erik Anonby.- 4. Case In Kurdish; Songül Gündoğdu.- 5. Pronominal Clitics Across Kurdish: Areal Distribution, Structural Variation, And Diachrony; Ergin Öpengin And Masoud Mohammadirad.- 6. A Cross-Dialect Account Of Kurdish Past Tense Categories, With Special Reference To Southern Kurdish; Sara Belelli.- 7. Adpositions In Kurdish; Maximilian Kinzler.- 8. Post-Predicate Constituents In Kurdish; Geoffrey Haig.- 9. The Typology Of Connectivity And Complex Constructions In Kurdish Dialects; Yaron Matras.
