A Formal Description of Sorani Kurdish Morphology

TL;DR

This paper provides a formal, computationally implementable description of Sorani Kurdish morphology, addressing gaps in linguistic and computational understanding of its complex morphological patterns.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive formal model of Sorani Kurdish morphology suitable for finite-state transducer implementation.

Findings

Formal description of Sorani Kurdish morphology

Implementation-ready finite-state transducers for analysis and synthesis

Addresses previously unstudied morphemes like emphasis endoclitic =^iš

Abstract

Sorani Kurdish, also known as Central Kurdish, has a complex morphology, particularly due to the patterns in which morphemes appear. Although several aspects of Kurdish morphology have been studied, such as pronominal endoclitics and Izafa constructions, Sorani Kurdish morphology has received trivial attention in computational linguistics. Moreover, some morphemes, such as the emphasis endoclitic =\^i\c{s}, and derivational morphemes have not been previously studied. To tackle the complex morphology of Sorani, we provide a thorough description of Sorani Kurdish morphological and morphophonological constructions in a formal way such that they can be used as finite-state transducers for morphological analysis and synthesis.