A semantic study of 'cut' and 'break' verbs in Sorani Kurdish

Abstract

Guerssel et al. (1985) proposed Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs) which incorporate a universal set of semantic components to predict the syntactic behavior of cut and break verbs. They state that a CAUSE component occurs in the LCS of break verbs and enables these verbs to appear in the inchoative construction. They state that a PRODUCE component occurs in the LCS of cut verbs and enables these verbs to appear in the conative construction. This study explores the semantic components and the syntactic alternations of a group of cut and break verbs in Sorani Kurdish. My dissertation provides a new database for Sorani Kurdish derived from my intuition as a native speaker of Sorani, on line Sorani newspapers, and six other native Sorani speakers. Kurdish does not have a conative construction so the study focused on whether Sorani cut and break verbs can appear in the inchoative construction. I observed the syntactic behavior of Sorani cut and break verbs in concrete and metaphorical contexts, and found that some verbs have different syntactic behaviors when the object or the context changes. I compared the semantic extensions of cut and break verbs in Sorani and English in concrete and metaphorical contexts. The results show that there is significant overlap between Sorani and English in the concrete and metaphorical objects that are used and not used with each verb. I investigated the LCS components of cut and break verbs semantically by providing four different semantic tests, three for durativity and one for intentionality. These tests provide semantic evidence for the CAUSE and PRODUCE components in the LCS of the verbs. The results show that the semantic features of the verb change depending on the features of the objects and whether they are in metaphorical or concrete contexts. Some Sorani verbs demonstrate different semantic components from English verbs in their meaning as they are used in different contexts with different objects. I compared the syntactic and semantic features of Sorani verb to determine the degree to which their syntactic properties correlate with their semantic features. The results show a strong correlation between the syntactic and semantic features of some verbs in concrete and metaphorical contexts. Some verbs have different syntactic and semantic features in concrete and metaphorical contexts. My study shows that verbs in different languages do not have the same syntactic behavior even when they are semantically similar. Semantic equivalents differ in the types of objects that undergo the actions in both concrete and metaphorical contexts. Semantic tests of durativity and intentionality are not perfectly correlated with the syntactic behavior of all verbs.