Kurdish Language

This paper investigates the conflation of “Path” conceptual semantic in Motion events in the Central-Kurdish (Sorani) Language, Ardelani Dialect, in light of Talmy notions in this regard. According to Talmy, in each Motion event, four main elements i.e. “Figure”, “Ground”, “Path” and “Motion” are involved. These conceptual meanings can be lexicalized either on “Verb Root” or on “Satellite”. By considering a conceptual meaning like “Path” and investigating the surface element that shows it, we can define the typology of languages as “Verb-Framed” or “Satellite-Framed”. In this paper, after analyzing sample sentences containing “Path” concept, in addition to showing the way this concept is lexicalized in Kurdish, we would define typology of Ardelani dialect among Indo-European languages. Data used in this paper is a selection of 23 sentences extracted from a corpus of 890 sentences containing Motion event that have lexicalized Path concept. These sentences have been produced by 18 different native Ardelani speakers in three different groups.

The ongoing increase in the population of Kurdish as Heritage Language (HL) learners encouraged the present study to explore the learners’ motivations as well as the influential factors on its development. Second Language Motivational Self-System (L2MSS) was adopted as the theoretical framework wherein, the subscales of the Ideal-self, Ought-to self and Motivational Intensity were explored. The study drew on a mixed-methods design in which semi-structured interviews were conducted with four undergraduate participants and a total number of 213 undergraduate Iranian learners of Kurdish participated in a survey. The qualitative results indicated that the interviewees had a positive experience of learning Kurdish in the classroom and were more enthusiastic to get engaged in the process of learning in the future . Furthermore, the quantitative results indicated that the participants more often pursued Kurdish in terms of the Ideal self and that learning Kurdish revealed to be an opportunity to fulfill the learners’ wishes. It was also found that the male participants were propelled by stronger motivational force which was more probably due to stronger sense of identity among male participants.

Previous studies have focused mostly on the syntactic features of the linking particle (Ezafe) in simple noun phrases with little attention paid to its semantic representations and functions specifically within the context of deverbal noun phrases. The present study aims to analyze semantic functions of the linking particle as it appears between a deverbal noun and its various modifiers, and compare them with their corresponding elements in sentences in a Distributed Morphology framework (DM) in Hawrami. This study shows this ancient linker's trace in most Kurdish dialects exhibits agentive semantic functions in addition to expressing possession and modification. Furthermore, the subject of unaccusative verbs at the sentential level is realized as the patient/possessor or as the theme/possessor of their corresponding deverbal noun phrases. However, the subject of unergative verbs assumes the agentive/possessor role in their corresponding noun phrases. Moreover, the object of transitive and ditransitive verbs is represented as a patient or theme, and also as a possessed entity before the subject is realized as the possessor in the corresponding deverbal noun phrases. Results indicate that the representation of both sentences and their corresponding deverbal noun phrases within DM framework provides stronger support for a syntactic movement account of deverbal noun phrases, their semantic functions, and properties in Hawrami.