Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Department of Linguistics, Il.C., Islamic Azad University, Ilam, Iran
2 PhD Candidate of Department of Linguistics, Il.C., Islamic Azad University, Ilam, Iran
3 Department of English Language and Literature, Il.C., Islamic Azad University, Ilam, Iran
Abstract
The present corpus study is intended to investigate the linguistic and pragmatic properties of primary and secondary topics in southern Kurdish. The correlation between the primary and secondary topics with factors including grammatical roles, animacy, definiteness, referentiality and specificity and grammatical agreement was calculated. In its canonical use, primary topic is matched with animate agentive subject and secondary topic is matched with inanimate patient object. Dalrimple and Nicholavae (2010) and Lambrecht (1994) as the main theoretical framework have been frequently cited. Topichood is defined based on the aboutness relationship. In other words, topic is that element in the sentence which is the main concern of the stated proposition. Pragmatic considerations play an important role in determining the possible topic(s) of a sentence. The natural conversations among the native speakers of southern Kurdish were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The investigated corpus included 450 sentences in which 208 topics were chosen, codified and analyzed using SPSS software. The results indicated that primary topics were found to be mainly definite, animate, specific, referential, agentive and basis of (obligatory) grammatical agreement. The secondary topics were, also, found to have s high correlation with their expected properties including being object, specific, referential, patient and being the basis of (optional) object agreement. In terms of morphological coding, both primary and secondary topics were found to be represented employing definite noun phrases. In terms of prosodic coding, primary topics were found to be unaccented while secondary topics were reported to have (activating) accent. Due to their salient status in the discourse, the investigated topics (primary and secondary) could be both deleted or moved within their sentences. However, in their marked cases, both primary and secondary topics are not matched with their inherent and expected properties. However, this mismatch is not correlated with a linguistic coding of topics in southern Kurdish. The careful study of probable repercussions of this mismatch of topics and their expected properties in Kurdish and other Iranian languages is a possible hint for future studies.
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