What Sorani Kurdish Absolute Prepositions Tell Us about Cliticization

Abstract

Relying on the behavior of the so-called ’absolute’ prepositions and their clitic complements in Sorani (Central) Kurdish, this paper argues that the latter are best regarded as affixes, despite their apparent syntactic transparency. It is further shown that non-local attachment possibilities can be accounted for either in terms of argument composition with the verbal head of the sentence or in terms of linearization approaches. These two possibilities are in complementary distribution. The first one occurs exclusively in the past transitive construction, where the ’clitic’ complement of the preposition is in some sort ’reanalyzed’ as an Object complement of the verb and is consequently realized as a lexical affix following the verbal stem. The second attachment occurs either in the intransitive or in the present transitive constructions. Since the clitic complement in this case is adjacent to the preposition, it can be introduced as an affix in the lexical entry of the preposition, where the morpheme order is underspecified. Considered as an independent domain object, it can nevertheless be attached to a host different from the preposition, which accounts for the attachment to the element preceding the preposition.

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