Case Marking in Semnani
Paper ID : 1091-ICIL
Authors:
Arash Salar *
No.72, 6/1, Jahanmehr Ave, Gomnam St., Jahad Sq.,
Abstract:
Which mechanisms does the head of a clause in Semnani Language employ to mark their canonical arguments? The outcome of a well-grounded answer to this question not only does it help us to gain a deeper understanding of the typological characteristic of Iranian Languages particularly of Semnani but also it cast light on change in progress in the language. My hypothesis is that Semnani employs clitics and postpositions to case-mark its arguments. Although Semnani has overt case marking it is still not cristal clear that case marking is being done via clitics or affixes. In the literature affixes is presupposed without proper investigation. In this article I will firstly present some typological characteristics of Semnani and I will extract case markers through the examples which has been collected through field work and partly from the literature. Then I will examine the case markers being clitics or affixes with the criteria proposed by Zwicky & Pullum (1983). I will finally draw the reader's attention to the fact that employing the case markers is changing from clitics to affixes.
Keywords:
Semnani, Case Marking, Clitics, Affix, Particle
Status : Paper Accepted (Oral Presentation)
10th International Iranian Conference on Linguistics
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