Ezafe Construction in Kurdish: A Cognitive Approach

The present study aims to investigate the Ezafe construction in Kurdish (Sorani dialect) based on cognitive grammar. The nature of the methodology of this qualitative research is descriptive-analytic, and the data have been collected via the interview with Kurdish speakers. The authenticity and originality of the collected data have been approved by Kurdish speakers of this linguistic variety. Ezafe marker is considered as the invoker of an intrinsic relationship between two entities having a kind of conceptual proximity.  In a way, one entity is considered as a reference-point based on which the location of the other entity is cognitively determined. In this construction, the landmark plays the role of a reference-point to provide a mental path to the trajector as the target. The findings showed that Ezafe in this dialect is the result of the grammaticalization of a relative pronoun HYA by which the intrinsic-conceptual relation between elements is profiled in a complex sentence. It should be noted that Ezafe marker has developed from the relative pronoun HYA in Old Persian. Accordingly, this relative pronoun, as an Ezafe marker, has been gradually transformed into an element profiling an asymmetric relationship between congruent entities within a single phrase (N Ez N; N Ez adj; N Ez preposition; N Ez nominalized verb) or in a clause (predicative Ezafe and topicalizing Ezafe). Also, the results showed that Ezafe marker indicates this asymmetric relation at different linguistic levels.