2019-12

UKH Journal of Social Sciences (Issue : 3) (Volume : 5)

This study explores the use of presuppositions in the Kurdish short story, Zilkê Şixatê (The Matchstick), which is written in Northern Kurmanji dialect (hence, NK) by Isma’il Hajani. It attempts to determine which type of presupposition is the most recurring one in the short story and why it is so. The data in this study are analyzed descriptively and qualitatively. Yule’s (2006) classification which divides presupposition into six types has been employed: existential, factive, non-factive, lexical, structural, and counterfactual. The data of the research are sentences which contain presupposition triggers (ie linguistic forms to mark presuppositions). Applying the formula presented by Oktoma and Mardiyono (2013: 79), the results obtained throughout this paper show that different types of presuppositions have different percentages from the total number of presuppositions. They are (94) in number. It is noted that the most dominant type of presupposition used in the short story is the existential presupposition, manifesting definite descriptions of facts about real life, while the structural presuppositions have the lowest percentage. This shows that much of the story text is written to definitely describe the main theme, the characters and the events as they are. Finally, this study is particularly important because no other such studies have been conducted on the use of presuppositions in any literary work in NK. Therefore, this study occupies a crucial place in the research literature into pragmatic aspects of NK.

2019-12

Humanities Journal of University of Zakho (Issue : 7) (Volume : 4)

This study investigated the production of English monophthongs by Kurdish EFL learners at university level. Twenty native speakers of Northern Kurmanci (ie NK) undergraduate EFL learners read a list of sixty English words containing all the twelve English monophthongs. Their reading of the words was recorded and then transcribed by the researchers. The recording of each word was listened to several times for detecting mispronunciation of the monophthong vowel in it. After careful examination, results showed that the central vowels were the most problematic sounds for Kurdish EFL learners in terms of pronunciation followed by high back vowels. In principle, participants were expected to have problems with central vowels of English, mainly because they do not exist in their mother language, but the findings indicated that high back vowels also are quite noticeably difficult for them to correctly pronounce, even though these already exist in their mother language, NK Kurdish. The main reasons Kurdish EFL learners mispronounce English monophthong vowels are due to the absence of some of these vowels in their first language and also due to the participants’ lack of exposure to and practice of English pronunciation.