Some Morphological Points about Clitic Pronouns in Kakhki Dialect

Kakhki dialect is one of the dialects of the south of Razavi Khorasan Province which is spoken in a subdivision of Gonabad, called “Kakhk”. This dialect and two other dialects (Khaniki and Ferdowsi), as far as the researcher knows, are the only linguistically described dialects in the Razavi Khorasan and South Khorasan provinces which have the ergative case marking. Ergative case marking in this dialect has led to some interesting morphological features. Some of these features will be studied in this paper. The results of the research show that functions and positions of the nominative and accusative clitic pronouns in this dialect are remarkably different from the ones in the standard Persian. Moreover, regarding the order of the clitic morphemes related to the verb base (the Bybee’s Relevance principle), this dialect shows features different from those of the standard Persian. Another interesting morphological features in this dialect is the addition of nominative clitic pronouns to the free pronouns with different functions. It was found that clitic pronouns in this dialect do not attach to the adpositions, and from this aspect, this dialect differs from the contemporary spoken Persian language.