On the Phonological Autonomy Condition of Clitics: the Case of [ wæpi ] in Kalhuri Kurdish

Articles in Press

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 The Department of English Language and Linguistics, The Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

2 The Department of English Language and Linguistics, The Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Razi University, Iran

Abstract

Clitics are a group of bound morphemes connected to phonologically autonomous hosts. Having adopted an intralingual-comparative approach, the present study aims to investigate the status of [wæpi ] as a preposition of Kalhuri Kurdish. The reason as to why this preposition is chosen for the present study is that this morpheme plays the role of the host for pronominal enclitics despite its lack of phonological autonomy. The data of the article were collected through interviewing 15 speakers of each variety of Kalhori, Ilami, and Sorani The collected data were then transcribed and analyzed.. After comparing the Kalhuri data with those of Ilami and Sorani, it was revealed that [wæpi ] has previously been a phonologically independent morpheme that has lost its autonomy but is still hosting pronominal enclitics. This goes to show that the condition of phonological autonomy of hosts may need to be studied with historical considerations. The form [wæpi ] is represented as [wæ ] in Ilami and [pe: ] in Sorani. This is enough evidence that could show that these two forms essentially used to be parts of the single morpheme /wæpi /. It can also be concluded that there is an active and dominating constraint in Kurdish which does not allow prepositions larger than one syllable.

Keywords

Journal of Researches in Linguistics

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 03 February 2025

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