Approaches to Ergativity in Indo-Aryan

Aspect shifts in Indo-Aryan

The grammaticalization literature notes the cross-linguistic robustness of a diachronic pattern involving the aspectual categories resultative, perfect, and perfective. Resultative aspect markers often develop into perfect markers, which then end up as perfect plus perfective markers. We introduce supporting data from the history of Old and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, whose instantiation of th...

Basic Intransitivity : a Typologically Relevant Feature of Indo-aryan Indo-aryan Linguistic

The paper deals with the status of intransitivity in the global economy of the language in Hindi/Urdu. While arguing for the basic character of intransitive basis (on morphonological and syntactic grounds), in the first section, I also show (second section) that the behaviour of reflexive pronouns and emphatics in Hindi/Urdu is typical of languages which display a single base for both uses (ref...

Historical Phonology of Old Indo - Aryan Consonants

Generative Approaches to Ergativity

This paper surveys the principal Generative syntactic analyses which have been proposed for ergativity, found primarily in Inuit, Austronesian, Mayan, and Pama-Nyungan language families. The main puzzle for Generative Grammar is how to analyze the behavior of ergative and absolutive arguments in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object. I show in this paper that early approaches...

Dialects in the Indo-Aryan landscape

The Indo-Aryan language family currently occupies a significant region of the Indian subcontinent, its member languages being spoken in the bulk of North India, as well as in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The historical depth of the textual record and the geographical breadth of the Indo-Aryan linguistic area, the diversity of its languages (226 in all), and its many...