A Study of Pronominal Enclitics in Mazinani Dialect

This descriptive-analytic research describes the morphosyntax ofpronominal enclitics in Mazinani dialect spoken near Sabzevar. These enclitics are located immediately adjacent to the verb and despite Standard Persian, they encliticize to imperative and negative morphemes, past verbal stem, perfect present aspectual morpheme, direct object, indirect object, and adverb of location. Moreover, in addition to playing the role of accusative and genitive cases, these elements play different syntactic roles such as dative, benefactive dative, ablative, and instrumental cases without any overt morphological case-assigner. Based on VP-shell hypothesis, the structural case assigning to the clitic arguments was investigated in double object constructions. It was concluded that, historically, the domain of cliticization has been decreased from IP to VP in favour of Ezāfe constructions in Mazinani dialect.