The Syntax of Sorani Kurdish Prepositions A Lexical Account within the framework of HPSG

This paper presents a lexical account of the syntax of Sorani Kurdish prepositions within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Kurdish dialects have a rich class of prepositions and prepositional collocations with a complex syntactic behavior (Edmonds 1955, Mackenzie 1961). This situation results from severla factors. The first one involves the constitution of this class: the initial set of prepositions has been enriched with elements borrowed from other classes, such as substantives. The latter generally combine with primary prepositions (ex. 1) to form compound prepositions (ex. 2), though some of them have undergone a grammaticalization process and can function as prepositions by themselves. These " new " prepositions have nevertheless preserved a part of their nominal properties and differ with respect to their morpho-syntactic properties from primary prepositions. Furthermore, apart from prepositions, Kurdish dialects have also postpositions. The latter combine with primary prepositions, wich have a rather poor semantics, in order to express more precise semantic values (ex. 3). The second point concerns the realization of the complement: some primary prepositions allow for a clitic (affixal) realization of their complement, while others do not (ex 4, 5). Furthermore, the alternation of the form of the complement generally gives rise to an allomorphic variation of the preposition itself. Primary prepositions are thus divided into two subclasses, simple vs. absolute prepositions (Table 1). Finally, depending upon the preposition, the clitic complement is not necessarily attached to the preposition and can be realized at distance, preceding or following the preposition. However, the non-local realization is subject to strict constraints and is limited to two cases: the clitic is either attached to the verb (ex. 7) or to the right edge of the constituent immediately preceding the preposition (ex. 6). The first type of attachment occurs only with transitive verbs in the past tenses. The significant fact is that, contrary to what would be expected, the complement of the preposition is not realized as a clitic in this case, but as a verbal personal ending (ex. 8a,b). Thus, in the past transitive construction, the complement of an absolute preposition displays two different forms depending on whether it is attached to the preposition or to the verb. In the latter case, it has the same shape as a verbal argument (i.e. direct object). In order to account for these properties, this paper suggests a classification of Sorani Kurdish prepositions on the basis of …