Pollet Samvelian: A Lexical Account of Sorani Kurdish Prepositions

In Sorani Kurdish dialects, the complement of a preposition can generally be realized either as a syntactic item (NP, independent pronoun or PP) or a bound personal morpheme (clitic/affix). However, the affixal realization of the complement gives rise to a range of specific phenomena. First, some prepositions display two different phonological forms depending on the realization of their complement: the variant combining with a syntactic item is referred to as `simple', while the variant combining with an affixal complement is called `absolute'. Furthermore, unlike syntactic complements, which are always realized locally, the affixal complement of an absolute preposition can have a non-local realization, attaching to a host with which it has no morphosyntactic relations. In order to deal with these facts, this paper proposes a classification of Sorani prepositions along two lines: the affixal versus non-affixal realization of the complement on the one hand and its local versus non-local realization on the other hand. All cases of non-local realization receive a lexical account, either in terms of argument composition or in terms of linearization constraints on domain objects.

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