Despite the chronic shortage of institutional support, research in Kurdish linguistics continues to thrive. Among recent developments, one can mention the International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics, which began as an informal workshop in Bamberg in 2013 and has since grown into a regular international conference series, or the Database of Kurdish Dialects, the first largescale web-accessible dialect survey of Kurdish, hosted at the University of Manchester. What remains a desideratum, however, is a platform for disseminating quality research in a readily accessible format.The new series Bamberg Studies in Kurdish Linguistics (BSKL) aims at filling this gap by providing a publication forum for high-quality research on Kurdish linguistics that is open access, hosted at an established research institution, and committed to high standards of scientific excellence. BSKL adopts a broad stance on what can be considered "Kurdish linguistics", in terms of the languages in focus, the range of topics, and the format of the volumes. The primary criterion is scientific excellence, and the editors are committed to ensuring high standards. It seems very appropriate that the first volume in the series is a selection of contributions to the International Conference on Kurdish Linguistics, held in Amsterdam in 2016, which provides a vivid crosssection of contemporary research in Kurdish linguistics.It has taken several years of planning before we could finally inaugurate the series, and we are extremely grateful to a number of people for their patience and support during that time, in particular the staff at Bamberg University Press, who agreed to the volume conception several years ago and have continued to support it since. Finally, I would like to thank the co-editors of the series, Erik Anonby, Ergin Öpengin and Ludwig Paul, for collaborating with me on the new series.

No 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).10.20378/irb-56326 'For example the men [...] don't allow (it).' (Mahmoudveysi et al. 2012: 143, 7:11)

No abstract