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Article published In: What is a verb? – Linguistic, psycholinguistic and developmental perspectives on verbs in Germanic and Semitic languages
Edited by Eva Smolka and Dorit Ravid
[The Mental Lexicon 14:2] 2019
► pp. 189–208

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Personal indices in the verbal system of the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Zakho

Published online: 15 January 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.00004.gut
Abstract
The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho is a highly endangered dialect of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic which was spoken by the Jews of Zakho (northern-Iraq) up to the 1950s, when virtually all of them left Iraq for Israel. Thanks to documentation efforts which started in the ’40s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the interest of native speakers, we possess a rich textual documentation of this dialect today ( (2012). The syntax of Neo-Aramaic: The Jewish dialect of Zakho. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Sabar, Y. (2002). A Jewish Neo-Aramaic dictionary: dialects of Amidya, Dihok, Nerwa and Zakho, northwestern Iraq. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Avinery, I. (1988). The Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Zākhō. In Hebrew. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). These resources, together with recently conducted fieldwork, are used in order to analyze the linguistic status of the verbal personal indices in this dialect, following the concepts presented by Bresnan, J. & Mchombo, S. (1987). Topic, pronoun, and agreement in Chicheŵa. Language, 63(4), 741–782. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar as well as Corbett, G. G. (2003). Agreement: the range of the phenomenon and the principles of the Surrey database of agreement. Transactions of the Philological Society, 101(2), 155–202. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. For each person marker, its status as a pronominal affix or as an agreement marker is established. The synchronic situation is compared with the known historic situation in older strata of Aramaic, such as Classical Syriac. The resulting analysis shows that the same apparent person marker may behave differently in different syntactic environments. Another conclusion is that there is no clear-cut dichotomy between pronominal affixes and agreement markers, as transitional cases exist.
Article outline
  • 1.Theoretical prerequisites: Agreement markers versus pronominal affixes
  • 2.The JZ verbal system
    • 2.1Overview
    • 2.2The conjugation of the copula
  • 3.The S-suffix
    • 3.1The S-suffix as a subject marker
    • 3.2Morphemic analysis of the S-suffix
    • 3.3Interim conclusions
    • 3.4The S-suffix as an object marker
  • 4.The L-suffix
    • 4.1Overview
    • 4.2The L-suffix as a direct object marker
    • 4.3The L-suffix as an indirect object marker
    • 4.4The L-suffix as a subject marker
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (34)
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