Clitic Positioning and Stacking: Evidence from Ardalani-Kurdish

Location: COMM 311

Ardalani is a variety of Sorani Kurdish, a member of the northwestern languages of the Iranian language family. This language exhibits some sort of split ergative pattern. That is, there is a distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs in the present and present progressive, on one hand, and past tense and present perfective, on the other hand regarding agreement as well as the obligatory presence of a subject clitic. Furthermore, clitic positioning manifests interesting patterns in Ardalani. That is, they attach to the left-most element inside the verbal domain only, and manifest a strict ordering when they are stacked. Clitics can also stack together inside the verbal morpho-complex, but only if there is nothing else inside the vP. There are some restrictions on the stacking operation inside the verbal morpho-complex as well. In this article, we address the syntactic and morpho-syntactic cliticization puzzles in Ardalani, and offer solutions within the framework of the Minimalist Program.
The issues examined in this article include determining the exact domain of cliticization by resorting to Phase Theory (Chomsky 2001 and work thereafter) as well as a dynamic/contextual phase condition suggested by Bošković (2014). Moreover, we discuss the dual nature of the subject clitic, and explain the rigid order of clitic stacking inside the verbal domain as well as their ordering patterns inside the verbal complex with respect to negation and aspect morphemes. Our analysis also includes interesting cases of object clitics of certain prepositions that may travel outside of PP, and attach to an element on the left. Adopting a linearization process based on the output of Narrow Syntax and Vocabulary Insertion a la Distributed Morphology, we account for the linear order of clitics in this language.