| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although ezafe has been studied by many scholars for many years, it does not yet have a transparent grammatical status. Grammarians have regarded ezafe as a polysemous "word" carrying over ten different "meanings/functions." After a brief review of the previous treatments of ezafe, this paper will present a syntactic analysis, followed by a morphological description and a semantic analysis of this ubiquitous morpheme. It will also compare the distributional properties of other relevant bound morphemes with those of the ezafe. It will finally conclude that ezafe is a dummy clitic-like morpheme which is semantically void, while syntactically it functions as an "associative marker" which subordinates its [+N] host, on the left, to its following complements.
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