Agreement and Case-Marking in Kuhdashti Laki: A Comparative Syntactic Study

Agreement, case marking, and word order are key mechanisms for encoding syntactic relations, each language employing them according to its typological structure. This study aims to describe and analyze the agreement and case-marking systems of Kuhdashti Laki and compare them with Khorramabadi Luri and Kalhori Kurdish within Haig’s (2008) framework. The findings show that in Laki, these systems are dual and dependent on tense and verb transitivity: in the non-past, the pattern is nominative-accusative, with the subject appearing directly without a case marker and the object typically marked by an accusative marker. In contrast, in the past tense, agreement shifts to a split ergative pattern where the transitive subject is marked via a pronominal clitic attached to the object, and the verb remains in the default third-person singular form without overt agreement. This structure distinguishes Laki from Kalhori Kurdish and Khorramabadi Luri, which maintain a consistent nominative-accusative system regardless of tense or transitivity. Despite surface similarities, the evidence shows that Kuhdashti Laki has an independent and coherent syntactic structure and should not be regarded as merely a dependent or mixed variety between Kurdish and Luri.
 
Extended Abstract
1.Introduction
Languages encode the syntactic relations between the verb and its core arguments - namely the subject and the object - through three principal mechanisms: word order, case marking on noun phrases, and agreement patterns that are triggered by the interaction between the verb and its arguments and morphologically surface on the verb. While agreement and case marking have been the focus of extensive typological and descriptive research in Iranian linguistics, studies devoted specifically to Laki remain strikingly limited. This paucity of research has left the precise genealogical and typological status of Laki within the Iranian language family unresolved and a matter of scholarly contention.
Kuhdasht, where this variety of Laki is spoken, offers a particularly salient site for investigation due to its geographical location and longstanding, intensive contact with neighboring speech communities, most notably Khorramabadi Luri and Kalhuri Kurdish. Against this background, the present study investigates the agreement and case-marking systems of Kuhdashti Laki and undertakes a comparative analysis with those of Khorramabadi Luri and Kalhuri Kurdish. The inquiry is guided by two central research questions: 1- What typological properties characterize the morphosyntactic systems of agreement and case marking in Laki? and 2- What is the overarching alignment pattern observable at the morphosyntactic level in Laki? By addressing these questions, the study seeks to clarify the typological profile of Kuhdashti Laki, to contribute to the broader understanding of alignment phenomena in Iranian languages, and to shed light on the dynamics of morphosyntactic variation in a region shaped by sustained patterns of language contact.

2.Theoretical Framework
The present study adopts the theoretical framework proposed by Haig (2008). Haig demonstrates that cross-linguistic variation in the way verbs agree with clausal constituents gives rise to distinct agreement patterns, which are closely tied to alignment type. According to his framework, the differences in verb agreement with arguments result in two major alignment configurations that are directly conditioned by morphosyntactic alignment, whether nominative–accusative or ergative-absolutive. Haig argues that in Iranian languages, agreement is typically organized around two principal systems: (1) nominative-accusative alignment, in which verbal agreement targets the subject, aligning the verb with the features of the nominative argument; and (2) ergative-absolutive alignment, in which verbal agreement instead targets the absolutive argument, i.e., the object.
Crucially, Haig (2008) posits that most Iranian languages exhibit a split-ergative alignment system, in which the distribution of nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive agreement is conditioned by tense-aspect categories. In other words, ergative alignment in Iranian languages is not uniform but follows a tense-based split: clauses whose predicates are derived from present stems generally display nominative-accusative alignment, whereas clauses whose predicates are derived from past stems exhibit ergative alignment. This split, realized primarily in the verbal morphology, underlies the structural variation in agreement patterns across Iranian languages.
3.Methodology
The data for this study were collected through fieldwork, primarily via interviews with Laki speakers in Kouhdasht. Topics included daily events, personal memories, and social interactions, designed to elicit a wide range of morphological and syntactic structures. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, phonetically annotated, and analyzed morphosyntactically. For comparative purposes, data on Kalhuri Kurdish were collected from five speakers in similar sociolinguistic conditions, and Khorramabadi Luri data were gathered based on the researcher’s intuition and verified with native speakers. The data were analyzed in detail to identify agreement systems and case-marking patterns, and the findings were then examined comparatively to highlight typological similarities and differences among the three languages.
4.Results & discussion
Based on the analyzed data in this study, the Kouhdashti variety of Laki exhibits a nominative–accusative case marking system in the present tense, where only transitive objects are overtly marked with the case suffix “-a / -i”. In contrast, past constructions, particularly with transitive verbs, show a split-ergative pattern, in which the subject lacks an independent marker and is realized in the oblique case, linked to the object through a clitic pronoun. Subject agreement in intransitive verbs is fully realized in both present and past tenses. However, in past transitive verbs, subject agreement is omitted, and the subject is transferred to the object as a clitic pronoun, resulting in a split agreement that is sensitive to the verb’s tense.
     Comparative analysis with Khorramabadi Luri and Kalhuri Kurdish reveals that Kalhuri Kurdish has a stable, tense-independent agreement system, without ergative constructions. Its case marking likewise follows a nominative-accusative pattern, in which the subject appears unmarked, and the object receives a direct or indirect case suffix, “-ɑgɑ”. Similarly, in Khorramabadi Luri, both agreement and case marking operate independently of tense, consistently exhibiting a nominative-accusative alignment.
5.Conclusions & Suggestion
Based on the linguistic evidence presented in this study, it can be concluded that the Kouhdashti variety of Laki, despite sharing some superficial features with Kalhuri Kurdish and Khorramabadi Luri, exhibits a distinct and independent system in terms of case marking and agreement. By employing dual syntactic patterns, specific agreement mechanisms, and the use of pronominal clitics, this variety demonstrates a unique internal cohesion that sets it apart from neighboring languages. Therefore, Laki should not be regarded merely as an intermediate or hybrid dialect between Luri and Kurdish, but rather as an autonomous linguistic system with its own distinctive grammatical features.
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