Passive Construction in Laki Dialect of Darreh Shahr: A Functionalist Approach

Laki is a one of the dialects of Southern Kurdish spoken in Ilam, Kermanshah, Lorestan, Hamadan, and some areas in Northern Iran. The Darreh Shahri variety is also an accent of Laki dialect spoken in Darreh Shahr Township of Ilam Province.  The present article aims at investigating the passive construction in Laki dialect of Darreh Shahr in the framework of role and reference grammar. The linguistic analyses according to this method have a special importance because this theory pays attention to three syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels simultaneously. Passive construction is widely used in the languages of the world. At first, the writers of this article have studied the previous researches and works of other grammarians and linguists and then all types of passive constructions in Laki spoken in Darreh Shahr according to role and reference grammar. In this paper, it has been shown how the structures of passive is made. Here, passive constructions in present and past tenses have been explained and it has been depicted that there are four kinds of passive constructions in Laki variety of Darreh Shahr including: high-frequency passive, low-frequency passive, out-of-date passive and impersonal passive. Moreover, it has be shown that passivization is one of the processes of valency reduction in verbs. The passive structure is the best known technique for what is termed as valency-changing process. Furthermore, this process is related to syntactic level. Finally, it is shown that role and reference grammar and key concepts of this theory i.e. actor and undergoer explain passive structures in Laki dialect of Darreh Shahr properly.