On some effects of Utterance Finality, with special consideration of South Asian languages

Pitch lowering, avoidance of prosodic prominence, and segmental reductions in utterance-final position are well known crosslinguistic tendencies. In verb-final languages the prosodic effects of Utterance Finality intersect with an independent, crosslinguistic tendency of verbs to receive relatively weak prominence within larger prosodic domains. As a consequence, verbs in SOV languages are special targets for the effects of Utterance Finality. After providing crosslinguistic illustrations of these effects I focus on a number of phenomena in South Asian languages which can be explained in terms of the intersection between Utterance Finality and Verb Finality. These include the relative order of negation and verb and the apparent optionality of ‘be’-deletion in Hindi, the difference in verb accentuation between main and dependent clauses in Vedic, and (possibly) the fact that Kashmiri ki/zi-clauses, unlike relative clauses, have V2, rather than verb-final order

Ergative in Hindi/ Urdu: Reconciling the perfective oblique and the heavy imperfective analyses

Careful analysis of auxiliary occurrence in Hindi/ Urdu perfective and imperfective clauses suggests that Bjorkman’s (2015) “heavy perfective” account of ergative as oblique case licensed by Perfective aspect is not incompatible with Coon’s (2013) “heavy imperfective” proposal. Only the imperfective clause has a Person feature, whose checking allows nominative case assignment (contra Coon, the ergative split is not due to disruption of “ergative alignment”). Ergative is a participial case that appears where nominative fails; ergative languages differ from nominative languages in how they allow/ disallow Person checking and the projection of Tense. In Hindi/ Urdu, Person checking differentiates imperfective from perfective clauses. In person-split ergative languages, Person checking differentiates [+Person] from [-Person] or [0Person] arguments. My argument from Hindi-Urdu is thus relevant to person-split ergative languages, and (potentially) to the Romance auxiliary split.

Urdu intonation

The current study is an analysis of an Urdu speech corpus using a Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) transcription system to develop a model of Urdu intonation. The analysis indicates that Urdu has three pitch accents (L*, L*+H, H*) and boundary tones associated to two phrase types: accentual phrase (AP) boundaries (Ha, La) and intonational phrase (IP) boundaries (L%, H%, LH%). The AP is a pitch bearing unit on a single word, or more than one word in the context of (a) iza?fat, (b) conjunctive va?o, (c) case markers, (d) complex postpositions, and (e) complex verbs. Moreover, this study also investigates the tonal structure of declarative, interrogative (wh-questions, yes/no-questions), and imperative (semi-honorific, polite honorific) sentences in neutral focus context using 50 utterances produced by ten speakers. Results indicate that (i) all declarative sentences consist of a series of APs, represented as (aL) L* (H) Ha, except the sentence final AP, represented as (H*) L%. (ii) wh-questions are different from their corresponding declaratives in terms of pitch range and the final boundary tone; (iii) imperatives are different form their corresponding declaratives in terms of final boundary tone

Structure Matching and Structure Building in Marathi Complex Predicates

This paper presents a descriptive exploration of three distinct types of complex predicates in Marathi with the aim of trying to answer deeper questions about structure building and structure matching in language. In particular, we investigate for each type, the selectional relations between the main and light verbs and the division of labour between them with respect to the lexicalization of the event structure in syntax. We show that a class of complex predicates in a language is not homogenous and that different types of light verbs contribute different kind of information. We analyze the different patterns of Marathi complex predicates using the framework of Ramchand (2008, 2016) which provides an explicit decomposition of the verbal domain required to account for the composition of complex predicates

Urdu/Hindi Complex Predicates of Motion and the Manner/Result Complementarity

This paper surveys complex predicates of motion in Urdu/Hindi (Hook 1974, Hautli-Janisz 2013), a spatial resultative construction that denotes manner of motion along a path. In particular, I show that the combinatorial possibilities between main verb and light verb are driven by the principles of manner/result complementarity set forth by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2008, 2013). In order to identify these meaning components in Urdu/Hindi verbs, I propose a set of truth-conditional and syntactic tests that identify manner versus result components in the class of Urdu/Hindi motion verbs. Moreover, I provide an analytical framework that shows how the dichotomy drives the patterns found in this type of complex predicate

Future Reference and Epistemic Modality in Hindi: The gaa particle

This paper is concerned with the interpretation of the Hindi particle gaa , which is often referred to as the `future tense\u27. Gaa  is often used in plain future assertions. In addition to its use in plain future assertions, gaa  is also used to make epistemic modal claims that lack future orientation. The paper proceeds from the assumption that the gaa  particles in both usages are one and the same.Given that assumption, the primary focus of the paper is to oer a univocal analysis of gaa  that specifies the semantic contribution of the morpheme in both instances. The study is partially informed by previous work on the semantics of English will , a morpheme that exhibits similar interpretive variability (i.e. it can befound in both plain future and epistemic utterances - see, among many others, Jespersen 1924; Enc 1996; Hornstein 1990; Sarkar 1998)

Review of Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession

This paper is a review of the book Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession, a collection of 11 papers all dealing with the cross-linguistic realization of the concept of possession through various morphosyntactic constructions. After a short introduction, the review summarizes the contents of the volume and provides an evaluation

The Principle A Problem

The presence or absence of Principle A of the Binding Theory can be explained by a requirement at the syntax semantics interface. Principle A effects surface in the presence of unmodified self, where there is a requirement for the subject and object to be identical; this requirement triggers self-incorporation into the predicate. In contrast, modified self -incorporation is blocked in the syntax, giving rise to an asymmetric part-of relation. Given that self-incorporation is absent, we predict that Principle A effects do not surface, and this is exactly what we find