A minimalist analysis of the subjunctive mood in the clausal structure of central Kurdish

الملخص EN

This paper aims to shed light on the morphosyntactic characteristics and distribution of the subjunctive mood in Central Kurdish (CK henceforth).

To achieve this, the study adopts Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program.

In addition to the data from previous studies, further data are provided as the authors are native speakers of the language under study.

The proposed hypotheses are that an inflectional projection namely Mood Phrase (henceforth MP) is the locus of mood markers (henceforth Mm) that is C-commanded by Negation Phrase (henceforth NegP) and in turn C-Commands Tense Phrase (henceforth TP).

Further, the portmanteau prefix desimultaneously functions as the indicative Mm, positive polarity marker (PPM), and imperfective aspect maker (IAM) in both past and present.

The data demonstrate that in CK the subjunctive is not in conformance with Stowell’s (1993) classification to subjunctives and that CK utilizes mood as means to express Modality rather than modal verbs thus being in line with Palmer’s (2003, p.3) argument: “languages have either mood or modality, but not both”.