Case-marking and Agreement System in Arani Language within the Theoretical Framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program

This paper examines the case-marking and agreement system in Arani language within the theoretical framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program (MP). Arani is one of the central dialects of Iran whose ancestry is unclear, but is closer to the Persian language (Boyce, 1998). The language has been extensively used in Iran for some time (Brunner, 1977), however, today it is limited to Aran-o-Bidgol, in the northeast of Isfahan province. In order to study and extract its ergative model, the sentences and data were collected through interviews with 20 speakers, and in a few cases, through questionnaires and a collection of books. The results of the data analysis showed that Arani language follows split ergativity. The present transitive verbs in this language represent the Nominative-Accusative pattern, and the past transitive verbs follow the Ergative-Absolutive pattern. In addition, the analysis of the data showed that the transitive verbs have no agreement with the object of the sentence, and they appear by default in the form of the third singular. The ergative case of the subject is inherent and conditional, and is marked by the doubling clitic. Also, in the compound verbs, the host of the clitic is the preverb of the compound verb.