The rise of ergativity in Hindi: assessing the role of grammaticalization

This article investigates the origins and development of the ergative patterning in Hindi. Following traditional Indo-Aryan scholarship, two evolutions are discerned: (i) the reanalysis of a passive as an ergative construction, and (ii) the development of an ergative case marker ne. Three different hypotheses have been postulated in the literature to account for the latter change, two of which suggest a grammaticalization path: the first argues for a case marker as a possible source, the second points towards a lexical source. The third hypothesis maintains that language contact is involved in the change. We scrutinize all three hypotheses and conclude that the ne-clitic is borrowed from Old Rajasthani and introduced in analogy to other clitics, which were already in use as reinforcers of existing case functions. We argue furthermore that the rise of the ergative marker can only be adequately explained in relation to the constructional change in (i). Drawing on the traditional account which traces the origins of the ergative construction back to a former passive construction through reanalysis, we argue that it was actually this constructional reanalysis that allowed the introduction of an ergative marker in the language

Dative alternation in Indian English: a corpus-based study

The dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction (I give my sister a book) vs. the to-dative construction (I give a book to my sister). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was performed based on a sample of N = 943 sentences that were drawn from the Kolhapur corpus. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of 14 predictors that are known to influence the dative alternation in other macro-regional varieties of English. Three predictors were found to be significant: the verb (modeled as a random intercept), the pronominality of the Recipient and the difference in length between the Recipient and the Theme. Our results further corroborate earlier findings that the to-dative construction is more frequently used in Indian English than in other varieties. We argue that the latter tendency may be associated with a transfer from Hindi

A cross-theoretical and cross-linguistic perspective on the L2 acquisition of case systems = L'acquisition de systèmes casuels en L2 : des études à travers plusieurs théories et langues

B

Ergativity in modern and middle Indo-Aryan: a critical digest

Ergativity in Indo-Aryan languages has been a much-discussed issue for a long time. Not only has ergativity been particularly well-described with regard to Hindi (cf. Kachru and Pandharipande 1979; Comrie 1984; Saksena 1985; Hook 1985; Mohanan 1994; Montaut 2001, 2006; Butt 2006), much has also been written about the origin of the ergative pattern in Indo-Aryan from a historical point of view (cf. Hock 1986; Bubenik 1989; Butt 2001; Stronski 2009; Verbeke and De Cuypere 2009, among others). The Late Middle Indian stage of Apabhramsa in particular has turned out to be crucial in the alleged development from accusative to ergative alignment (cf. Bubenik 1998). However, in the study of this transition, various problems have arisen. For instance, the early explanation that the ergative construction originated from an Old Indo-Aryan passive construction has lost ground (cf. Hook 1991; Peterson 1998; Stronski 2009) and the more fundamental issue of whether it is possible at all to study alignment in Late Middle-Indian has been called into question on the basis of the literary and artificial nature of the language (cf. Tieken 2000). In this paper, we provide evidence that no Indo-Aryan language is an ergative language. It is argued that ergativity, as a classifying property of languages (cf. its traditional definition established by Dixon 1979 and Comrie 1978), does not consistently apply to the Modern Indo-Aryan languages. At the same time, however, we show that there are various features resembling the ergative pattern that do occur in Modern Indo-Aryan

India: een wereld van verhalen

Als één van de oudste cultuurgebieden op aarde, wordt India sinds de oudheid gekenmerkt door een bijzonder rijke verhalenwereld. Sommige verhalen zijn (deels) gebaseerd op historische gebeurtenissen, andere geheel ontsproten aan de fantasie van getalenteerde vertellers. De regio Zuid-Azië kent een lange en woelige culturele geschiedenis, gekenmerkt door instromen van diverse migrerende en veroverende volkeren, die er allen hun sporen nalieten, uiteraard ook in het verhalencorpus. Bovendien vonden verscheidene wereldreligies, hindoeïsme, boeddhisme, jaïnisme en sikhisme er hun oorsprong, en konden religies als islam er op een heel aparte manier ontwikkelen tot een typisch Zuid-Aziatische vorm. Tegen deze achtergrond geeft dit volume een overzicht van verschillende aspecten van de verhalenliteratuur in India. De omvang van het onderwerp betekent natuurlijk dat er keuzes gemaakt zijn geworden, maar we hebben gepoogd enkele van de meest frappante onderwerpen naar voren te brengen. Dit boek is onderverdeeld in drie grote delen: ten eerste, de klassiekers, ten tweede, verhalen en religie, en ten derde, lokale verhalentradities

Some linguistic features of the Old Kashmiri language of the Bāṇāsurakathā

The Bāṇāsurakathā is a sharada manuscript in Old Kashmiri composed by Avtar Bhatt, dated between the 14th and 16th centuries. It retells the love story of the demon Bāṇa’s daughter Uṣā with Krishna’s grandson Aniruddha, and the ensuing fight between Bāṇa and Krishna, as it is found in the Harivaṃśapurāṇa. This paper focuses on the linguistic features of the Old Kashmiri language in which this manuscript is composed. Old Kashmiri belongs to the Early New Indo-Aryan language stage, a stage crucial for a number of syntactic developments which determined the Indo-Aryan languages of today. First, the language found in the Bāṇāsurakathā is situated among the attestations of Old Kashmiri found in other manuscripts. The language is younger than that of the Mahānaya-Prakāśa, but older than the language used in the Lallā-Vākyāni. Second, a number of linguistic features of Old Kashmiri are presented, such as the case marking and the verb agreement. Third, the paper focuses on the phenomenon of pronominal suffixation, well known in Modern Kashmiri, but not present in Apabhraṃśa. It is shown that the first traces of pronominal suffixation already existed in the Bāṇāsurakathā, but their use was not yet grammatically fixed

A diachronic account of converbal constructions in Old Rajasthani

This paper presents the results of a multilayered diachronic analysis of one of the most important subordinating devices in IA, i.e. converbs. This is a corpus-oriented study based on an early variety of New Indo-Aryan, namely Old Rajasthani. We discuss: (a) the morphology of the converb and the possible pathways of its evolution through the centuries; (b) the syntactic properties of converbal chains, with a special focus on main argument marking and the 'same-subject constraint'; and (c) the semantics of converbal constructions and the adverbial and clause-chaining properties of converbs. Our research has interesting implications for the aspectual status of the converb: aspect seems to be the most important factor determining the main argument marking in converbal chains