Some morphological and morphophonemic features of Arbili Kurdish.

This work represents the first major attempt to investigate Arbili (Hawleri) Kurdish which is spoken in Arbil Province by the inhabitants of towns and villages in the area s and wiched between the two Zab rivers all the way northeast to the Khoshnawati mountains. Never has this dialect of the Sorani group been studied in earnest before because it has been eclipsed by another Sorani dialect; viz. Suleimaniya Kurdish (SLK), on which St and ard Kurdish has been based. Studies of AK are urgently needed since the speakers of AK have recently been moved out of their locale under duress to areas where either no Kurdish whatsoever is used or other forms of Kurdish are spoken. The perpetuation of the prevalent circumstances places the very survival of the dialect in dire jeopardy. This work is the first major contribution to recording AK. Furthermore, it provides first-h and data, which have been meticulously selected and checked for accuracy. These data can also be used for other metalinguistic analyses and research purposes. In an endeavor to familiarize the Western linguists and /or scholars with the terminology and nomenclature of Kurdish dialects which their Kurdish counterparts prefer to use nowadays, this study has provided the equivalency of what is familiar in the literature of both. The focus has been on presenting the phonology, morphology and morphophonemics of AK as it is actually spoken in everyday life without endeavoring to either deliberately approximate it to St and ard Kurdish or purge it of loan words from neighboring languages--two common pitfalls that bedevil many Kurdish linguists nowadays. Emphasis has been placed on the complex system of clitics and their functions in AK. These clitics combine in a specific order according to their function. They are typologically rare in the sense that they may encliticize onto any element which appears immediately before the verb in AK, whose sentences are verb-final. AK has much more in common with some similar Sorani dialects spoken in Koye, Raw and iz and Khoshnawati areas than SLK does. Hence this study of AK can account for many of their linguistic phenomena better than studies of the latter can. Areas of divergence from St and ard Kurdish have been particularly elaborated upon.Ph.D.LinguisticsMiddle Eastern literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156581/1/9034420.pd