The Typological Study of Agreement System in Ayaski Dialect (South Khorasan)

The purpose of the present article was to describe and study the agreement system typologically in Ayaski dialect based on Comrie's pentagonal system (1978). This language variety is one of the subgroups of the Tuni dialect, which is spoken in the north of South Khorasan province, and belongs to the southern western branch of Iranian languages. The data of the current research has been collected by field method such as observation and interview with Ayaski speakers. All collected sentences were obtained with the participation of at least ten Ayaski speakers aged between 34 and 71. The analysis of available data showed that the agreement system in this dialect is split, and is sensitive to aspect, time and person. In sentences with present tense, both with intransitive and transitive verbs, the agreement system was from a nominative-accusative type. This agreement did not depend on the intransitive or transitive verb, so the agreement system in the present tense was not sensitive to the transitivity of the verb. In sentences with past tense, both with intransitive and transitive verbs, the agreement system was from an oblique-accusative type. In the nominative-accusative system, the subject in half of the cases was formed as an agreement inflectional suffix in the verb. In the oblique-accusative system, agreement were also manifested by oblique clitics, and were of neutral type.