The tense-aspect-mood in Khezeli Kurdish

The purpose of this study is to describe tense, aspect, and mood in Khezeli a member of the South-Western Iranian languages family. The data was retrieved from a corpus of audio files and transcribed notes gathered from native speakers living in Karezan district of Ilam province. Like many languages, in Khezeli, the tense, mood, and aspect categories are coded fusionally. Thus, these three categories were investigated as one category called tense-aspect-mood category. The results showed that the future tense is not coded in this dialect. As a result, the context and time adverbials are the only devices to differentiate the future tense from the present tense. In addition, the past and present tenses as well as five aspects are inflectionally coded: perfective, progressive imperfective, non-progressive imperfective, perfect and non-perfect aspects. Khezeli also consists of five moods: indicative, indicative/injunctive, subjunctive, imperative, conditional/optative. It was revealed that perfect/non-perfect and perfective/non-perfect dichotomies are not the same in Khezeli; because, perfect/imperfective and non-perfect/perfective aspects can co-occur in this dialect. On the whole, Khezeli consists of 15 tense-aspect-mood categories. Four of them are in the present tense and the remaining eleven are in the past tense. All of the categories have subject-object case marking system.