A Study of Inflectional Categories of Noun in Sistani Dialect

Abstract

The present article aims to provide a synchronic study of the inflectional or morpho-syntactic <br />categories of noun in Sistani dialect. These categories comprise person, number, gender or <br />noun class, definiteness, case, and possession. Linguistic data was collected via recording <br />free speech, and interviewing with 30 (15 females, 15 males) illiterate Sistani language <br />consultants of age 40–102 years, living in central (Markazi) district of Zabol city in Sistan <br />and Baluchestan province of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The research results indicate that <br />nouns are inflected in three distinct persons i.e. first, second, and third persons with either <br />singular or plural in number. Grammatical gender of nouns takes no specific morphological <br />marker. As to the category of definiteness, this dialect makes use of syntactic devices (like <br />demonstrative adjectives), and/or morphological devices (such as the use of /=ak/ and /=e/ <br />clitics) to display the definite and indefinite nouns. Its case system is nominative-accusative <br />system. In this regard, only the accusative or objective case marking is morphologically <br />realized by the object marker /=a/. In addition, possession is expressed through the use of the <br />word /ml=e/ ‘belonging to' or the preposition /az/ ‘from, of' along with nouns/noun <br />phrases/personal pronouns and also applying ezɑfe - construction in the form of genitive <br />structure.