An analysis and description of case marking in four Persian dialects of Khuzestan

Case marking is one way of showing grammatical relationships between the constituents in the sentences. In this study, case marking will be discussed in four Persian dialects of Khuzestan, namely Dezfuli, Shushtari, Behbahani and Hendijani. The data in this study have been collected through field study using a questionnaire for interviewing 33 native speakers of these dialects. Our theoretical basis is mainly Comrie (1978) which defines five language types based on case marking systems.
Data analysis revealed that case marking in Dezfuli, Shushtari and Hendijani is subjective and tense, modality and animacy of the subject or object have no effect on the case marking system in these three dialects. But data about Behbahani showed that tense is effective in case marking in this dialect. In present as well as in future transitive and intransitive clauses, case marking system is neutral. That is, the subject of the intransitive and transitive clauses and also the object have no marker and are all unmarked. It should be noted that in Behbahani, the Persian object marker “RA” is not used at all. But in the past tense, the subject is duplicated by a non-nominative clitic which can choose different hosts. That is, case marking in past tense is ergative. Also the verbs "want" and "have" in Behbahani, unlike other verbs, show ergative case marking, both in the past and in the present tenses.