LILA 2022

EZAFE IN SOUTHERN ZAZAKI

Songül Gündoğdu
Muş Alparslan University (Turkey)

The present study describes and analyzes the morphological expression in Southern Zazaki of the 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: [NOUN-EZ1 MOD1-EZ2 MOD2-EZ3 MOD3]. (Southern) Zazaki (unlike, e.g. Persian) reflects both case and the phi-features of the head noun on each Ezafe morpheme in a noun phrase. This talk is focused around two morphological 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 marking of the case observed in object, oblique, and possessive constructions, regardless of the case value assigned to the DP externally (Paul (2009); Todd (2002); Toosarvandani & van Urk (2014) i.a.). Secondly, Southern Zazaki uniquely employs a separate series of “D-form” Ezafe morphemes when an already-modified DP serves as a possessor, or the complement of certain adpositions (Todd (2002); Paul (2009); Werner (2018); Keskin (2010) i.a.). It provides a cohesive analysis of both the syntax of the Ezafe construction in Zazaki – based on syntactic analyses of Ezafe in other Iranian languages (Kahnemuyipour 2014; Atlamaz 2016) which argue for DP-internal agree-based movement to intermediary functional projections on the nominal spine – and provides a mechanism for case concord (à la Norris (2017)) within the nominal domain. What’s more, the present analysis details an instance of grammatically conditioned allomorphy in complex possessives that produces the unique paradigm of “D-form” Ezafe markers in Southern Zazaki.