Event Schemas and Thematic Roles in Ilami Dialect of Kurdish

Abstract

Speakers use schemas to organize their knowledge of the world. Without these mental structures, communication would be too difficult, if not impossible. Schemas are of different kinds and event schemas are considered as one of the most important categories of schema. In this paper, we aim to study different kinds of event schemas like, “being schema”, “doing schema”, “moving schema”, etc. in Ilami Kurdish. Our analysis is mainly based on the Dirven & Verspoor classification. In order to analyze these components, we will cite Kurdish examples, and then we try to analyze these instances by determining main thematic roles of each category. We will also discuss how these roles are affected by or affect something, in an event schema. Results show that Ilami more or less uses the categories previously studied in English.