An investigation of clitic hosts in Ardalani kurdish based on Phase Theory

Phase Theory has been proposed as the latest achievement of the minimalist program to optimize syntactic computation of language.The purpose of this paper is to study and analyze of Ardalani Kurdish data and to what extent phase theory is useful in explaning the clitic hosts in Ardalani Kurdish. we showed that the explanation of clitic agreement in Ardalani would follow the principle of phase impenetrability condition . Data collection was based on field methods, library and the use of researcher language intuition. We also showed through a descriptive –analytical method based on theoretical framework of Citko (2014), the derivation of the phase of transitive single object phrases in Ardalani. The clitic hosts are limited to the complement of VP core in the first phase. Therefore, the elements that are in this range can be a good host for the matching word closure. Therefore the direct object and the non-passive component of the compound verb would be the best choice for the clitic. The clitic can also choose object-dependent adjectives and adverbs as hosts, provided that these elements are limited to the first phase. In this case, the clitic systematically selects these elements as the host. We also, by examining of the construction of adverbs, showed that there is restriction on the selection of adverbs and they are locally restricted. Whenever they are in the complement of the first phase, clitic will select them, but when they are outside the first phase, they can not be selected as hosts, and if selected, the sentence will be crashed. Finally, we concluded that phase theory is capable of explaining the clitic hosts in Ardalani



1. Introduction

Phase Theory has been proposed as the latest achievement of the minimalist program to optimize syntactic computation of language. At the end of each phase, part of the syntactic structure already formed, will be transferred to the phonological and semantic componant. Ultimately, according to the impenetrability condition(Chomsky 2000), only the head and specifier of the phase will be visible to further syntactic operations. This dissertation aims to study and analyze the Ardalani Kurdish data and to find that in what extent , the phase theory is valid in explaining the distribution of clitic hosts in Ardalani Kurdish. we showed that the explanation of clitic agreement in Ardalani would follow the principle of phase impenetrability condition . Data collection was based on field and library methods and the use of the researcher intuition. Through a descriptive –analytical method based on the theoretical framework of Citko (2014), this research is focused at the study of the derivation of transitive single and double object structures in Ardalani. Accordingly, the clitic hosts are limited to the complement of VP core in the first phase. Therefore, the elements that are in this range can be an appropriate host for the agreement clitic. Therefore, the direct object and the non-verbal component of the compound verb would be the best choice for the clitic. The clitic can also choose object-dependent adjectives and adverbs as hosts, provided that these elements are limited to the first phase. In this case, the clitic systematically selects these elements as the host.In this respect, adverbs are locally restricted on the selection of their hosts. Whenever advebs are in the domain of the complement of the first phase, clitics will select them, but when they are outside the first phase, like manner adverbs, they would not be selected as a host, and if they are selected, the sentence will be crashed and ungrammatical. As a result, we concluded that phase theory is adequate to explain how the clitics choose their hosts in Ardalani kurdish variety.