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Part of
Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 93–120

Person indexing in Sauzini

Subject vs. non-subject markers

| Boğaziçi University

An inquiry into the person indexing system of Sauzini, a West-Iranian language spoken in certain villages in the western Black Sea region of Turkey, reveals two different paradigms of bound person marking in the language. One is subject agreement markers on predicates and the other non-subject bound pronominals, namely clitics. The latter group which surfaces in different syntactic environments alternates with free pronouns. The distribution of pronominal clitics in Sauzini displays the different types of syntactic structures they take part in and reveals that the host they select is instrumental in formally differentiating between different argument types as well as semantic roles. Thus, an account of clitic behavior constitutes an instance of morphology-syntax and semantics interface in this language.

Keywords: clitics, agreement suffixes, distribution of personal pronouns, argument structure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Sauzini and person indexing
  • 3.Differences between subject agreement and pronominal clitics
  • 4.The behavior of pronominal clitics
  • 5.Implications of pronominal clitic distribution and some conclusions drawn
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.04tay
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