The Tense-aspect-mood System in Howrami Dialect of Paveh

Hawrami, a member of Gurani-Hawrami-Zaza language family, is a North-Western Iranian language. Many scholars consider Hawrami as a member of Kurdish languages (or dialects) but this is a controversial issue and structural differences between Hawrami and other Kurdish dialects have deepened this controversy. One of the differences is Hawrami’s complex system of Tense-Mood-Aspect (TMA), which this study aims to describe. A corpus of sound files and transcribed notes from NORM speakers of Hawrami living in Paveh has been used for this study. Analyses showed that TMA in Hawrami verbs consists of two tenses, past and present; five aspects including perfective, progressive imperfective, non-progressive imperfective, perfect and non-perfect ones; five moods including indicative, indicative/injunctive, subjunctive, imperative and conditional/optative ones. It was also revealed that, in Hawrami, perfective and imperfective aspects exist along with perfect and non-perfect ones. These possibilities together constitute 17 different categories, four of which in present tense and 13 others in the past. Besides, we found that Hawrami is mostly an ergative language, as 11 out of 17 TMA categories of this language have ergative case marking system. Ergative system characterizes itself with object agreement and adding some special pronoun clitics to the verbs.