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Zaniar Naghshbandi

Zaniar Naghshbandi

Academic rank: Assistant Professor
ORCID:
Education: PhD.
ScopusId: 1
Faculty: Faculty of Language and Literature
Address: Room 315, Faculty of Language and Literature, Kurdistan University, Sanandaj, Iran
Phone:

Research

Title
The Case of Alignment Shifts in Kurdish Varieties
Type
Speech
Keywords
Kurdish varieties, alignment patterns, language change, construction grammar, language entropy
Year
2023
Researchers Zaniar Naghshbandi

Abstract

Using the theoretical apparatus of constructionalization, the present study attempts to describe the past-tense alignment patterns that are realized as different constructions in Northern, Central, and Southern Kurdish varieties (Haig 2008). It will be argued that the structural and sematic diversities of these constructions in Kurdish, which in the available literature are generally referred to as ergative, post ergative, double oblique and accusative, can be uniformly described based on the successive changes of micro past-tense constructions that lead to the creation of new macro constructions and modified connecting nodes in each of the dialectal clusters of Kurdish. Moreover, it is shown that since these changes do not occur in isolation and affect the internal relationships among constructions in each dialect, they may lead to a number of alternations in the other domains of Kurdish grammar such as possessive expressions. Adopting such an approach helps us design a systematic descriptive model that can collectively account for linguistic differences in Kurdish varieties in a more plausible way. Additionally, it should be noted that such a collective model for capturing dialectal differences in Kurdish might be applied to pedagogical courses for Kurdish language.