A Typological Study of Case in two Dialects of Turkish Language in Iran (Azeri and Khalaji)

The present study is specific to the typology of the category of case in two dialects of the Turkish language; Azeri and Khalaji Turkish. Case Marking is one of the practical methods in order to show the syntactic relationship between sentence elements, so that it shows the syntactic relationship between the noun phrase and the verb. The main theoretical approaches of the present research is Bernard Comrie's (1989) Case Marking System, which introduced five language categories. The present study also deals with the Case Theory, which is the approach of Chomsky (1981) and is considered among the subtheories of the Government and binding theory. The selected data of the research is from literary and fictional texts and the collected sentences are extracted from these texts. According to the collected data, there are six types of Case Marking in the Turkish language and its dialects, which are; Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Ablative and Locative Cases. In the present study, also the effect of some factors such as Transitivity, Animacy, Gender, and Definiteness, on case marking have been investigated. Since these two dialects are two branches of the Turkish language, they have similarities and differences, which are analyzed typologically here in the present article.