Clitic in Kalhori Kurdish of Ilam

Clitics are medial linguistic units that have some characteristics of both affixes and words. The present research has been done to investigate clitics in Kalhori Kurdish of Ilam dialect. This investigation was done through a descriptive-analytic method whose data has been collected by referring to numerous resources of Kalhori Kurdish of Ilam and the linguistic intuition of the authors of this research. The patterns used to identify these clitics in this article are those criteria applied by Shaqaqi (1374) adopted from Zwicky and Pullum (1983) to investigate and classify the morphemes of the Persian Language. The results of this research show that the clitics of Kurdish dialect include: enclitic personal pronouns, object marker, linking verbs, marker of indefinite nouns, and the marker of past perfect tense and passive marker. Of these clitics, pronoun clitics (personal pronouns) have an agreement rule. This article shows also that the model of Zwicky and Pullum (1983) can be used as an appropriate scientific tool to identify and study Kurdish language clitics. The new achievement of this research is identifying "ɥ" clitic as the marker of the auxiliary verb in the past perfect tense and the existence of "ja" clitic for the passive verb.