The morphosyntax of Ezafe in Southern Zazaki

Abstract

The present study describes and analyzes the morphosyntactic expression of the Southern Zazaki Ezafe – a linking element in the nominal domain common among Iranian languages. This morpheme is used to link modifiers (i.e. adjectives and possessors) to their head nouns as follows: n-ez1 mod1-ez2 mod2-ez3 mod3. Southern Zazaki, like other languages of the Kurdish region (and unlike, e.g. Persian) reflects phi-features (and case) of the head noun on each Ezafe morpheme in a noun phrase. This paper is focussed around two morphosyntactic puzzles that arise in Southern Zazaki. First, while the Ezafe marker in general reflects the case of the entire DP, the presence of a possessor produces invariant oblique case, regardless of the case value assigned to the DP externally (Paul, Ludwig. 2009. Zazaki. In Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian languages, 545–586. Routledge; Todd, Terry Lynn. 2002. A grammar of Dimili. Also known as Zaza. Stockholm: Iremet Forlag; Toosarvandani, Maziar & Coppe van Urk. 2014. The syntax of nominal concord: What Ezafe in Zazaki shows us. Proceedings of NELS 43(2). 209–220 i.a.). Second, Southern Zazaki uniquely employs a separate series of “D-form” Ezafe morphemes in certain syntactic contexts (Keskin, Mesut. 2010. Zazaca üzerine notlar (Notes on Zazaki). In Şükrü Aslan (ed.), Herkesin Bildiugi Sır: Dersim. Iletisim, 221–244; Paul, Ludwig. 2009. Zazaki. In Gernot Windfuhr (ed.), The Iranian languages, 545–586. Routledge; Todd, Terry Lynn. 2002. A grammar of Dimili. Also known as Zaza. Stockholm: Iremet Forlag; Werner, Brigitte. 2018. Forms and meanings of the Ezafe in Zazaki. In Saloumeh Gholami (ed.), Endangered Iranian languages. Reichert Verlag i.a.). This study aims to provide a cohesive analysis of Ezafe in Southern Zazaki both with respect to its general phi- and case-sensitive realizations, as well as the distribution of D-forms.