Grammar in usage and grammaticalization of dan 'give' constructions in Kurmanji Kurdish
Résumé
Belonging to the family of Indo-European languages, Kurdish is part of the Iranian group of this family, which gathers several modern languages such as Balochi, Ossetic, Persian, Tadjik, etc. The two main dialects that are closely related to each other are the Kurmanji dialect and the Sorani dialect. The Kurmanji dialect, spoken by 65% of the Kurds, appears more archaic than the other dialects in its phonetic and morphological structure. Yet, Kurmanji and Sorani are two dialects that have the greatest number of common linguistic characteristics. We focus on two dominant grammatical categories used with dan ‘give’ in Kurmanji Kurdish, light verb constructions (LVC) and causative constructions illustrating the language change property. If light verb construction is a common use of the verb give in many languages, the causative form is dominant in the Kurdish language, as illustrated through our various corpora, dictionnaries, recent online newspapers and the Manchester Kurdish Dialects Database .
The Kurdish Kurmanji dialect is a very dynamic language showing many signs of neological forms: new words appearing in the newspapers, as well as lexicalization and grammaticalization phenomena. New grammatical constructions, new idioms and new compounds formed with dan are motivated by the need for expressivity, which illustrates the usage-based grammar principle and the pragmatic inference mechanism described by Traugott 1989 and Bybee 2014. We have categorized three kinds of causative constructions. Our main hypothesis in this paper is the use of dan as a causative auxiliary, that is to say a case of grammaticalization of a frequent verb following the chain from full meaning towards grammatical meaning. This use has been described in Gougenheim 1929 for the French verb donner ‘give’and was attested in Bouveret study 2012. We argue that the causative use of dan as an auxiliary construction is a major grammatical fact in the Kurmanji Kurdish. As described in grammaticalization literature, the wide usage of a very common verb, and its extensive productivity can lead to this bleaching process from full verb towards auxiliary. The grammaticalization process for dan is also proved in Kurmanji Kurdish through the use of light verb constructions and the high productivity of the verb in compounds as we will see in the following section. We claim in this paper that this grammaticalization of dan in Kurmandji Kurdish corresponds to a typological fact found in other languages (Gougenheim 1929, Von Waldenfels 2012, Newman 1997, 1998).
Domaines
Linguistique
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