Compensatory Lengthening in Central Kurdish: An Opaque Phenomenon in Harmonic Serialism

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 Department of Linguistics, University of Tehran. Iran

2 Professor Department of Linguistics, University of Tehran. Iran

Abstract

Kurdish, a northwestern Iranian language (Dabir Moghaddam, 2012, p. 598), holds a unique position among Iranian languages. Some scholars (McCarus 2009, p. 587) argue that Kurdish does not belong to a single, uniform group within Iranian languages, while they agree that this language occupies an intermediate position between the western, northern, and southern Iranian dialects. As such, the term “Kurdish” can be seen as a cover term for closely related language varieties in the western group of Iranian languages. Three main dialects of Kurdish are Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji), Central Kurdish (Sorani), and Southern Kurdish (Kalhori) (Blau, 1989, pp. 542-544 and McCarus, 2009, p. 587; Dabir Moghaddam, 2012, p. 601).
The present study investigates whether compensatory lengthening exists in the Kurdish language. If compensatory lengthening does occure, the deletion of a mora-bearing consonant in the coda position would result in a stray mora. This stray mora would then reconnect to its preceding vowel in languages where the coda consonant triggers Compensatory Lengthening (CL) and the vowel is the target. In Kurdish, there are tautosyllabic clusters with CL, such as /ʃahɾ/: [ʃɑɾ] ‘city’ and /taʕm/: [tɑm] ‘taste’, as well as heterosyllabic clusters with CL, like /lah.ʤa/:[lɑ.ʤa] ‘accent’ and /maʕ.nɑ/: [mɑ.nɑ] ‘meaning’. The primary focus of this study is to determine whether these two consonants are moraic in Kurdish and to identify the threshold for moraicity in this language. It is also important to note that these words are not native, so they can be seen as a nativization process adapted by native speakers of Kurdish.
CL has been extensively studied in many languages, including Persian and Kurdish. In Persian, this process has been examined from various perspectives; Darzi (1993) and Kord Zafaranlu Kambuziya (2000) conducted general investigations; Bijankhan (2000) and Sadeghi (2007; 2019) adopted a perceptual viewpoint, while Shademan (2005) approached it phonetically, and Safaie-Qalati (2013) used a cognitive approach. Among these works, only Mahdavi et al. (2019) investigated this process within the framework of Stratal OT (STOT).
In terms of Moraic theory, compensatory lengthening was studied by Alinezhad & Zahedi (2009) in Sorani Kurdish, Badakhshan & Zamani (2015) in Kalhori Kurdish, Sobati (2018) in Ilami Kurdish and Ahmadi Varmazani & Fattahi (2019) in Kermanshahi Farsi.

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References

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ZABANPAZHUHI (Journal of Language Research)
Volume 16, Issue 52 - Serial Number 52
October 2024
Pages 247-281

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