A comparative study of manner salience in Ilami Kurdish [in English]

This paper is an attempt to evaluate “manner of motion salience” in Ilami, a southern dialect of Kurdish. Manner components can cross-linguistically be encoded by main verbs, manner verbs, manner preverbs, and ideophones, among other linguistic devices. First, we will discuss the ways this semantic component is expressed in Ilami Kurdish. Then, in order to assess the salience of the manner component, a dictionary-based lexical survey and several experimental trials will be carried out. Following a study by F. E. Cardini (“Manner of motion saliency: An inquiry into Italian”, 2008), we will conduct a vocabulary investigation to calculate the number of manner verbs in Ilami Kurdish, and then compare the statistics with Italian (a verb-framed language) and English (a satellite-framed language) to measure manner salience in Ilami Kurdish in comparison with other languages. We will also perform several experimental trials, aimed at evaluating manner salience in the actual use of this dialect. Accordingly, the experiments will be carried out to assess “ease of lexical access”, which helps us to understand how readily participants (children and adults) can retrieve manner verbs from memory. Cross-linguistic analysis of Ilami Kurdish shows that this dialect is a relatively highly manner salient language, in which the elaboration of the manner component is rich and pervasive. This finding is supported by the dictionary-based lexical survey as well as ease of lexical access trials. Use of various strategies by Ilami Kurdish speakers to express manner sheds some light on the fact that manner salience is not solely affected by the lexicalization patterns of languages, as this component can also be encoded regardless of the path coding position.