Debonding of inflectional morphology in Kurdish and beyond

Abstract

The history of case marking across Iranian languages is often described in terms of a grammaticalization cycle, involving the erosion and loss of inherited case markers and their subsequent replacement by innovated case markers via grammaticalization.In this paper I point to certain phenomena in inflectional morphology of Northwest Iranian languages which are difficult to account for within a cyclic view of erosion and replacement.I note unexpected morpheme orderings in Southern and Central Kurdish, and in Gorani (definiteness preceding both case and plural), and the agglutinative nature of the Genitive case in Balochi and Gilaki, both of which are difficult to account for within traditional grammaticalization theory.I conclude that inherited inflectional morphology is not automatically doomed to erosion and loss, but may in fact extend its distributional possibilities and loosen its morphological integration with the base, a process referred to as debonding.I also discuss a crosslinguistically unusual source for the grammaticalization of definiteness marking, which contributes to the unexpected sequences of inflectional morphology in Southern and Central Kurdish, and in Gorani. Identifying the problemIn Northern Kurdish, there is a single overtly-marked case, which is the socalled Oblique.Within Kurdish in its broadest sense (Haig & Öpengin 2014), the Oblique case is also found in Gorani, Zazaki, and in some dialects of Central Kurdish.In Northern Kurdish, there is also a suffix marking indefinite singular, -ek, to which the Oblique case marker may attach, as in (1).10.

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