Gilaki reverse Ezafe: The two faces of a nominal linker

This paper examines a nominal linker (known as reverse Ezafe) in the Caspian language Gilaki. It is shown that the nominal linker in Gilaki is in fact the realization of two different morphosyntactic elements with distinct properties. In doing so, we also highlight the differences between reverse Ezafe and Ezafe, found in Persian and other Iranian languages. This study has implications for the typology of nominal linkers, leading to the conclusion that superficially similar linking elements, both within a language and across languages, may in fact have different syntactic properties and as such should be analyzed as distinct phenomena.