The Effect of Informative Structure, Grammatical Role and Syntactic Structure on the Postposing in the Sorani Language

The purpose of this corpus-oriented research is to investigate the effect of informative structure, grammatical function syntactic structure, verb type, grammatical weight and definiteness on the process of postposing in the spoken Sorani Kurdish language. Since the Kurdish language is an Iranian language like the Persian, it is a head-last language and verb ending sentences are considered unmarked but in the spoken language there is a greater tendency to produce marked sentences and postposing some constructions can be seen. In this research through relying on spoken corpus of Kurdish language taken from folklore collection (Ahmadi, 2020) and databased analysis, we have investigated the effective factors known by other researchers about the postposing process in the Kurdish language. This research shows that in Sorani spoken language, prepositional phrase constituent in indirect object and place adverb syntactic role with new informative structure move to after verb position and postposing occurs. In the case of predicate postposing, the type of copular verb is an effective factor. The direct object, subject, adverb of quantity and adverb of quality do not follow this principle except in limited cases that can be ignored. Grammatical weight and definiteness factors do not have effective role in postposing in this language.
Introduction
Every language has a special arrangement for the position of the constituents in the sentence. The important point is that the speaker unconsciously prefers an order of the constituents which makes it easier for the listener to process and understand the message. The speaker doesn’t always follow the predetermined linear order, and as a result, this leads to the production of a marked sentence. In fact, in marked sentences, there is a shift in sentence constituents from their original positions. One of the positions that constituents choose to move is the position after the verb. This displacement is known as postposing. In postposing, the constituent moves from the unmarked position to the marked one without any effect on the sentence meaning.
The language under study in this article is Sorani Kurdish. As one of the Iranian languages, Kurdish like Persian is a verb-final language, and the verb-final sentences in this language are considered unmarked. However, in spoken Sorani Kurdish, there is a strong tendency to produce marked sentences and to postpose some constituents.
     This analytical article uses a functional theoretical framework and a corpus-based approach to examine the spoken language of Sorani Kurdish in the Ravansar region. The data consists of folklore stories from the region that were recorded for this purpose. Given the frequency of postposing in the studied spoken language—and the lack of previous research in this area—it is important to investigate the factors influencing this process.
     Many studies have been conducted in different languages about postposing and effective factors in this process. The most comprehensive research on colloquial Persian language has been carried out by Frommer (1981), Rasekh Mahand and Qhyasvand (2013), Izadi and Rasekh Mahand (2018). In English and Italian languages, studies have been conducted by Wasow (1991), Ward and Birner (2004). Yamashita and Chang (2001) have studied postposing in Japanese, and Haig (2022) has researched the Kurdish language.
Methods
The current study was conducted on the natural data from the Jafi dialect of the Sorani Kurdish language. These natural data are extracted from the collection of folk tales of  the city of Ravansar. This data source is available in recorded and archived form. The speech corpus in this study consists of 3835 sentences extracted from 90 folklore stories. Applying a quantitative method of research and a statistical analysis, the sentences were classified into two groups—marked and unmarked—based on whether the verb occurred at the end of the sentence or not. In this classification, the number of marked sentences was 3,436, while the number of unmarked sentences was 399. Among the 3436 marked sentences, 2865 of postposed constituents were prepositional phrase and the number of noun phrase was 571. The number and kind of postposed constituent by syntactic role were as follow: Adverb of place 1670, indirect object 1195, predicate 350, subject, direct object, adverb of time, adverb of quality, adverb of quantity overall was 187.
Discussion and Conclusion
In this speech corpus, in terms of syntactic category, about 85%–90% of the postposed constituents are prepositional phrases, and in terms of grammatical role, they are primarily indirect objects and adverbs of place. The predicate ranks third, with a significant drop in frequency compared to the first two. The displacement percentage of direct object, subject, adverb of quality, adverb of quantity to the position after the verb compared to the previous three constructions is very small to the point that they can be considered accidental or exceptional. This research by investigating the effective factors in the postposing process such as grammatical weight, informative structure, familiarity, grammatical role, syntactic category and the type of relative verb, introduces informative structure, grammatical role and syntactic category as effective factors in postposing in this language and considers other factors ineffective.
     In this language, prepositional phrases in two grammatical roles—indirect object and adverb of place—account for the highest percentage of postposing. Since these constituents, in both syntactic roles, convey new information from an informative structure perspective, their movement to the post-verbal position helps listeners process and understand the message more easily. In predicative sentences with linking verbs that express movement, change, and transformation, the predicate is also postposed. In these cases, the postposing of the predicate similarly serves to facilitate comprehension. This research concludes that semantics is the primary factor in determining the post-verbal positioning of constituents.
Direct objects and subjects are not postposed, as they tend to express familiar or     assumed (old) information. The results show that the preferred linear order of constituents in Kurdish language is influenced by informative structure, syntactic category, syntactic role of constituents and the type of liking verb. Based on the statistical frequency of marked versus unmarked sentences in this research, we can draw the final conclusion that in spoken Kurdish, speakers have a strong tendency to postpose constituents conveying new information to a position after the verb. This facilitates easier transmission of the message and allows the listener to process and understand it more efficiently.
Ethical Considerations
Not applicable
Funding
Not applicable
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.