A Case Study of Opacity in the Progressive Prefix Relict in Kalhori Kurdish

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Department of English Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran

Abstract

In cases with Phonological opacity a process may unexpectedly fail to occur in an environment where its application is expected, or conversely, it may apply in an environment where its occurrence is not anticipated. In Kalhori Kurdish, although the progressive prefix lacks an overt phonological form, Fattahi (2023) identifies residual traces of this prefix as /t/ in the present tense forms of “bring” and “come”. However, in the data collected from the Gilan-e Gharb dialect of Kalhori Kurdish, this prefix appears as [ʧ], without a clear phonological motivation for the change in the verb forms. The forms [ʧæɾem] (“I bring”) and [ʧæm] (“I com”) raises the question of why the relict of this prefix has unexpectedly surfaced as an affricate with no apparent source of motivation. To investigate this phenomenon further, a 12-hour corpus of interviews with 15 native speakers of Kalhori Kurdish from this region was collected and analyzed. Adopting a descriptive-analytic approach and using rewrite rules, this study shows how the counter-bleeding of interaction of rules affects these verb forms. The study concludes that the relict /t/ undergoes partial assimilation, changing to [ʧ] before a glide, followed by the subsequent deletion of the glide in the next phonological process. This sequence of the changes explains the observed opacity in question. Also, the results support the claim of Kipasrky (1973), McCarthy (1999), and Kager (2006) providing additional evidence that processes involving counter-feeding and counter-bleeding interactions lead to surface opacity in phonological representations.

Keywords

References

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Journal of Iranian Dialects & Linguistics
Volume 9, Issue 2
March 2025
Pages 159-175

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History

  • Receive Date: 17 February 2025
  • Revise Date: 06 March 2025
  • Accept Date: 09 March 2025

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