Marked Ergative Constructions in Hawrami: The Opposition of Two Minimalist Approaches

The present paper seeks to present a minimalist account for the derivational process of marked ergative constructions in Hawrami in terms of Phase Theory (Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2004; Radford 2009; Citko2014). This phase-based approach is compared to the former feature-based approach advocated by Karimi Doustan and Naghshbandi (2011). It is argued that using Phase Theory and its related mechanisms and conditions like Phase Impenetrability Condition on the one hand and ignoring Split Cp Hypothesis (Haegeman and Gueron 1999) and the related Focus and Topic projections on the other hand would end up in a more optimal and economic explanation. From a macro theoretical viewpoint the results of this paper lend more empirical support to effects of Phase Theory on generating more optimal explanations in the framework of Minimalist Program