Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Parsa Bamshadi ¹
• Mahinnaz Mirdehghan Mirdehghan ²

¹ Ph.D. Candidate of Linguistics, Shahid Beheshti University

² Associate Professor of Linguistics, Shahid Beheshti University

Abstract

The definition and typological description of the category of voice can be provided in two ways: i) at the level of semantic arguments (or semantic roles), ii) at the level of grammatical relations (or syntactic functions). The most important theoretical concept that is determined in terms of these two levels of representations and enables one to capture the rich variety of voices is that of diathesis. Diathesis is defined as a pattern of mappingsemantic arguments onto syntactic functions. In the present research, we explore the typology of diathesis and voice in Kurdish language on the basis of Kulikov’s work (2011). The results of the research show that Kurdish has these diatheses: passive (agentless, absolute and impersonal), conversive, 2/3 permutation, causative (transitive and intransitive), antipassive, reflexive, reciprocal, and anticausative. Of these, only passive, causative and conversive have morphological realization on the verb. Therefore, based on this analysis, one can say that Kurdish has only three voices: passive, causative and conversive.

Keywords

• diathesis
• voice
• passive
• causative
• reciprocal
• reflexive
• Kurdish language