Agreement System in Ilami Kurdish

Abstract

Languages make use of three mechanisms to code grammatical relations: word order, case marking, and agreement. In the present study, an attempt is made to investigate agreement and the factors affecting agreement in Ilami Kurdish. To achieve this goal, Givon (2004) and Dabirmoghadam (1392) were adopted as the theoretical framework. The data were derived from interviews with native speakers using targeted questions. Results indicated that in Ilami Kurdish, 'nominative-accusative' agreement mechanism is employed as the main tool to signal grammatical relations. Also, it was proved that agreement system in the investigated language is not tense/ transitivity- sensitive. Another finding is that agreement is the main tool to code subject. However, using agreement to code object is both optional and affected by some factors including '(in)definiteness', being (non)referential', '(non)topical', and '(un)incorporated'. While, these factors were found to have some repercussions for coding objects, they are, however, irrelevant in coding subjects in Ilami Kurdish. Finally, it was found that factors including 'grammatical aspect' and 'semantic roles' of subject and object have no implications for agreement in Ilami Kurdish. l

Keywords

• grammatical relations
• nominative- accusative
• (in)definiteness
• referential- inferential