An Investigation into the Analyticity/Syntheticity of the Verbal Inflectional Categories in Khezeli Kurdish Dialect

Khezeli Kurdish dialect is a branch of the South-Western Iranian languages family. The purpose of this research is to describe the verbal inflectional categories of Khezeli and to investigate the analyticity/syntheticity degree of these categories. The data were extracted from a corpus of audio files and transcribed notes gathered from native speakers living in Karezan district of Ilam province. The tense, mood, and aspect categories in Khezeli are coded fusionally. Thus, these three categories were investigated as one category called tense-aspect-mood (TAM) category. The results indicated TAM category is coded both synthetically and analytically. In addition, the voice, polarity, agreement and causative categories are generally synthetically coded. The category-per-word value (cpw) is determined by counting the number of the inflected categories in the maximally inflected verb form. The obtained cpw value for Khezeli is 6-7 and, in this regard, Khezeli Kurdish dialect is classified among the most common languages of the world.