A Study of Inflectional Categories of Noun in Sistani Dialect

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

University of Sistan and Baluchestan

Abstract

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic
categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or
noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording
free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language
consultants of age 40–102 years, living in central (Markazi) district of Zabol city in Sistan
and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The research results indicate that
nouns are inflected in three distinct persons i.e. first, second, and third persons with either
singular or plural in number. Grammatical gender of nouns takes no specific morphological
marker. As to the category of definiteness, this dialect makes use of syntactic devices (like
demonstrative adjectives), and/or morphological devices (such as the use of /=ak/ and /=e/
clitics) to display the definite and indefinite nouns. Its case system is nominative-accusative
system. In this regard, only the accusative or objective case marking is morphologically
realized by the object marker /=a/. In addition, possession is expressed through the use of the
word /ml=e/ ‘belonging to’ or the preposition /az/ ‘from, of’ along with nouns/noun
phrases/personal pronouns and also applying ezɑfe - construction in the form of genitive
structure.

Keywords

References

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Iranian Journal of Applied Language Studies
Volume 9, Issue 2
November 2017
Pages 1-32

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