A Lexical Account of Sorani Kurdish Prepositions
Résumé
In Sorani Kurdish dialects, the complement of a preposition can generally
be realized either as a syntactic item (NP, independent pronoun or PP)
or a bound personal morpheme (clitic/affix). However, the affixal realization
of the complement gives rise to a range of specific phenomena. First, some
prepositions display two different phonological forms depending on the realization
of their complement: the variant combining with a syntactic item is
referred to as ‘simple’, while the variant combining with an affixal complement
is called ‘absolute’. Furthermore, unlike syntactic complements, which
are always realized locally, the affixal complement of an absolute preposition
can have a non-local realization, attaching to a host with which it has
no morphosyntactic relations. In order to deal with these facts, this paper
proposes a classification of Sorani prepositions along two lines: the affixal
versus non-affixal realization of the complement on the one hand and its local
versus non-local realization on the other hand. All cases of non-local realization
receive a lexical account, either in terms of argument composition or
in terms of linearization constraints on domain objects.