Clitic group in Kurdish: Prosodic phonology

Stress assignment in Kurdish is generally considered to be very simple and systematic. All the derivational affixes and most inflectional suffixes have affected the stress position and attract the lexical stress. Exceptional cases are some of the inflectional affixes and clitics that are called Prosodic Word Adjoiners (PWA). PWA and their hosts combine as host + clitic constituent to create Clitic Group (CG). This paper proposes a unified analysis of CG in Kurdish as one of the constituents in Prosodic Phonology that divide the representation of speech into hierarchically arranged units. Phonological Processes analyzed to confirm CG are Stress Assignment Pattern, Vowel Deletion (VD), Consonant Insertion (CI) and Glide Weakening (GW). VD is applied in phonological word level, while CI is limited to Clitic Group. GW is applied in both phonological word and Clitic Group level, but it is banned in phonological phrase level.