Mukri Kurdish Pronominal Clitics: A Prosodic Analysis

Clitics are basically inter-modular elements which interrelate phonology, morphology, and syntax. These elements lack phonological independency and need a phonological independent host to be realized phonologically and finally their distributions follow aforementioned modules. Mukri Kurdish pronominal clitics which are highly mobile can have different functions such as agreement, object (direct or indirect), possession, etc. Thereby, different categories can be their hosts. This paper investigates the position of Mukri Kurdish pronominal clitics within Prosodic Phonology (Selkirk 1995, Truckenbrodt 1999 and Anderson 2005) and the prosodic hierarchy. This research has been carried out by descriptive-analytical and field methods. To collect the data the main author’s intuition as the native speaker of the dialect, (15) hours recorded speech, Mukri Kurdish sites and newspapers have been used. The analysis revealed that Mukri Kurdish pronominal clitics are placed systematically on the right edge of the first phonological phrase in their VPs.