Inflectional Constituents in the Finite Lexical Verbs of Korta Dialect (Qal'e-ganj)

Korta is one of the dialects the variants of which are spoken in Rūdbār-e Janub and Qal'e-ganj towns located in the south of Kerman Province. From the geography of language use perspective, it is found at the contact-zone between Rūdbāri dialect, belonging to Baškardi (= Bašākardi) dialect group and ultimately to Southwest Iranian Languages Family, and Makkorāni dialect of Balochi language, a member of Northwest Iranian Languages Family. Hence, it can be correctly predicted that from the perspective of linguistic properties, this dialect plays the role of a link between these two language families. Following a synchronic approach, the present study attempts to linguistically describe the inflectional constituents available in the structure of finite lexical verbs of  the Korta dialect variant spoken in Qal'e-ganj town. To this end, by recording the free speech and conversations of 7 (fe)male, middle-aged plus, illiterate and native informants, a linguistic corpus has been collected and analyzed. Research findings indicate that there are 15 inflectional constituents in the structure of the related verbs which fall under the three major types: 1- (past/present) verb stem; 2- pre-verbal constituents including the verbal proclitic (Ɂ)a-, the prefixes of negation, prohibition, subjunctive mood, imperative mood, and the subject proclitics; 3- post-verbal constituents including the prefixes of past-tense marking, causative marking, progressive marking, past-participle marker, the attributive copula, the subject personal pronouns, and the subject/object agent clitics. Moreover, Korta utilizes the split-ergative structure in the verb past-tense system.