Singular concord in Kalhori Kurdish: A distributed morphology approach

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 Ph.D. candidate of Linguistics، Department of English Language and linguistics، Razi University، Kermanshah، Iran.

2 Department of English Language and linguistics، Razi University، Kermanshah، Iran

3 linguistics، Department of English Language and linguistics، Razi university، Kermanshah, Iran

Abstract

Singular concord is a term that has tended to focus on [NUM] agreement. It refers to the condition in which the verb cannot agree with the plural subject. In other words, despite the plural nature of the subject, the verb would carry a singular agreement morpheme. This research aims to find out whether Distributed Morphology and its post-syntactic mechanism are needed to describe the process of Singular concord in Kalhori Kurdish or it can be explained using lexicalist hypothesis? The ability to describe the subject-verb agreement relation can be used as a criterion to investigate the explanatory efficiency of different approaches in Kalhori Kurdish. For this purpose, after introducing the theoretical background and previous researches, we analyze data from Kalhori Kurdish; the analyses show that the assumptions of lexicalists cannot explain why in some sentences, with plural subjects, Singular concord is possible, but this phenomenon is not allowed in other structures. On the other hand, by analyzing the data in the framework of Distributed Morphology, it was found that only with the existence of morphological operations such as Impoverishment and considering the post-syntactic agreement process the dual behavior of these Kurdish structures can be explained.

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