Incorporation in Ardalani Kurdish: A Competition between Syntax and Morphology

Abstract

This study examines the process of incorporation in Kurdish with emphasis on recognizing the modular nature of this process in the context of syntactic-morphological theoretical debate. Noun incorporation is one of the morphological processes, in the normal case of which the internal subject of the noun is incorporated to the core of the lexical verb and causes the formation of a incorporated verb. Examination of Kurdish language data, extracted from the online Kurdish language corpus of university of Kurdistan shows that the syntactic approach cannot provide a proper explanation of the incorporation of nouns in this language; Because in Kurdish one can find examples of incorporation an external subject to a verb that violates the assumptions of a syntactic approach. Specifically, the incorporation of the external subject to the verb is considered the result of a movement in which the moving element has no government over its trace. Accordingly, the movement of the external subject towards the verb "Extension condition" violates syntactic derivations. This minimalist condition actually covers some of the limitations explained by the "head movement principle" in the theory of government and binding. Consequently, based on empirical observations and assuming the Extention condition in the derivation of syntactic constructions, it is logical to consider the incorporation of nouns into verbs in Kurdish as a morphological process, and not a syntactic one.

Keywords

• incorporation
• morphology
• argument structure
• extension condition
• kurdish