Ergativity in Behdini Mahlati Yazd Dialect

The present paper with the aim of a systematic study of Behdini dialect of Yazd, examined the alignment in this remaining dialect as one of the central dialects of Iran. The research data were collected though the field study and semi-structured interviews and the sentences were extracted in the natural context of the speakers. Following the transcriptions of interviews with 21- to 70-year-old, a corpus of around 8500 sentences was collected and analyzed. All extracted sentences were examined in terms of alignment. In this method, various types of sentences were classified based on the tense, transitivity, and structures. The manifestation of the syntactic relationship between verb and noun groups of the sentences were also studied. The findings of the study suggested that Behdini dialect followed the split ergative alignment which was sensitive to tense/aspect. In present tense sentences, the subject was direct and the verb showed full agreement with the subject. In contrast, in past tense sentences, the subject of transitive clauses beard no marker, the agreement in the verb would be Past tense or Past participle of main verb and, a prefix beard the agreement and was added to the verb. Interestingly a double code of prefixes was witnessed in this dialect, where a set of prefixes for singular and plural NPs were distinguishable in past simple and the other forms of past tenses.