When morphology does better than Syntax

A great number of West Iranian languages Persian, different Kurdish dialects, Hawramani, Zazaki...share several aspects in their noun phrase structure: 1. The surface word order pattern is strongly head initial. Adjectival modifiers, the possessor NP, prepositional phrases and the relative clause follow the head noun in a strict order. The head noun may be preceded only by some determiners – if present and in very few cases by an adjective. 2. Possession is expressed by means of a bare NP (or DP), which follows adjectival modifiers, if any. 3. All elements occurring between the head noun and the possessor NP are linked to the head noun and to one another by the Ezafe, which is realized as an unstressed vowel and is an enclitic. 4. Prepositional complements appear outside the Ezafe domain and follow the possessor NP. 5. Contrary to demonstratives and to numeral quantifiers, which are full-fledged words, determiners that express definiteness or indefiniteness are generally realized as suffixes. The word order pattern is identical to that of the Celtic noun phrase. However, unlike Celtic languages, the word order in the noun phrase does not parallel the one in the clause structure. Western Iranian languages being generally considered as verb final (SOV), the reversed order within the noun phrase has provided motivation for the application of the head movement analysis to the nominal domain in some recent studies (Kahnemuipour 2000). The expression of possession by means of an NP in close construction with the head noun, and, to some extent, the Ezafe construction is reminiscent of the Semitic construct state construction. Although the possessor NP is not constrained to be strictly adjacent to the head noun, as it is the case in construct state nominals, the constituents occurring between the head noun and the possessor NP have been nevertheless assumed to be subject to some significant constraints, leading to the analysis of the Ezafe domain as a domain of bare heads (X°s) adjunction (Ghomeshi 1997). This is reminiscent of the word-like properties of construct state nominals (Borer 1988). These peculiarities explain why the Ezafe construction has been a particular focus of interest in different studies on Persian and on Kurdish. Actually this construction raises several issues in syntax and morphology. The first and the most explored issue in previous studies is the internal structure of the NP. As mentioned before, among the different