A Typological Analysis of Compound Nouns in Rudbari Variant of Qal'e-Ganj

Abstract

Many linguists consider compounding as one of the most generating word-formation process utilized by most world languages to expand their lexical scope, a claim which stands true about Rūdbāri dialect (Kerman province) and its various geographical variants, as well. In this process, two free morphemes co-occur and create a compound linguistic unit. Since Rūdbāri compound nouns are much more frequent than other compound words, this paper will just focus on the study of its compound nouns. In more technical terms, this research attempts to synchronically analyze the compound nouns used in Qal’e-Ganji variant of Rūdbāri from a typological point of view and based on three criteria suggested by Bauer (2009) including headedness, the order of elements in compounds, and the semantics of compounds. The needed linguistic corpus has been collected through interview and free speech recording of suitable informants, questionnaire, note-taking and linguistic intuition. The results indicate that Rūdbāri, like most world languages, does not show invariable typological properties but works along a continuum and hence, the term "general tendency" should be used to describe its intended typological properties. Specifically, the general tendency of today's Rūdbāri of these three typological criteria is towards the headless compound nouns, head-initial compound nouns, and exocentric compound nouns, respectively.

Keywords

• rūdbāri dialect
• typology
• compounding process
• compound noun
• general typological tendency