Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
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.
Note that the findings in this paper are part of research that took place between 1990 and 1996. I am greatly indebted to my advisor, Professor Laurence Horn (Yale), and Professors Stanley Insler (Yale) and Gernot Windfuhr (University of Michigan). However, all the errors and lapses are mine alone.