The ergative construction in Kurdish

Abstract

It is well known that during the course of their histories a number of Indo-European languages, all of them members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the family, developed an ergative construction. Thus, in certain tenses of the verb, their grammars came to treat in forlly identical manner the subject of an intransitive verb and the logical object of a transitive verb, the agent (or logical subject) of this latter being given a different morphological marker. Now although ergativity has been studied in a wide variety of languages as a synchronic phenomenon, the opportunities for examining it from a diachronic point of view are in the great majority of cases severely limited by lack of historical documentation. The Indo-Iranian languages, however, form a notable exception. These, thanks to the availability of texts from closely related languages covering a time-span of some three millennia, provide us with a chance to observe both the development of the construction and its subsequent decline. The present paper will do no more than attempt to trace a part of this process, namely the way in which the ergative construction has disappeared from a certain area of western Iranian. It bases its arguments upon the assumption that the geographical continuum of the Kurdish dialects, whose grammars exhibit the whole range of possibilities from fully ergative systems in the north to fully accusative systems in the south, reflects the successive stages of a diachronic process. This being granted, it should be possible by ordering the synchronic patterns of representative dialects from the northern, the central and the southern regions, to arrive at a picture of the historical sequence of events which has led to the loss of ergativity in the southern dialects and to isolate the mechanisms involved in their resultant restructuring. The wider problems of precisely how the construction arose historically and of why within the Indo-European family it appears to be confined to Indo-Iranian will not be dealt with here.

Extending defective intervention effects

“…The subject DP in the past transitive clause in NG bears an oblique case. Examples (7b-d), repeated here as (17a-c), illustrate the case: It has extensively been discussed by scholars working on the ergative construction in Iranian languages that Kurdish past transitive constructions, which have come to be termed ergative, are historically derived from resultative past participle constructions in the earlier stages of the language (Bynon 1979(Bynon , 1980(Bynon , 2005Cardona 1970;Haig 2008;Karimi 2010aKarimi , 2010bTrask 1979). More specifically, Karimi (2010aKarimi ( , 2010b brings evidence from Old Persian that the ergative construction in Kurdish has evolved from a past participle construction and that the past transitive verb still retains the nominal properties of the past participle.…”

Remarks on Ergativity and Phase Theory

“…Kurdish, being a pro ‐drop split‐ergative language with an impoverished morphological case system, makes an elegant use of its pronominals to maintain accusativity in the non‐past tenses (present and future) and ergativity in the past tense (Bynon ; Friend ; Haig , ; Holmberg & Odden ; Karimi ,b).…”

The Evolution of Ergativity in Iranian Languages

“…That a selective range of Iranian languages conform to an ergative pattern in their case/agreement system is by no means a new finding (Bynon, 1979(Bynon, , 1989(Bynon, , 2005Trask, 1979); in addition, some theoretically insightful accounts of ergativity in such languages have recently been put forward (Holmberg & Odden, 2004;Karimi, 2010a,b;Van de Visser, 2006). The theoretical treatments of ergativity in general and of Iranian languages in particular share the theory-internal assumption that what makes an ergative transitive clause seem eccentric in terms of case/agreement, as opposed to the regular present tense (non-ergative) transitive clause, has to do with the nature of the ergative verb.…”