Journal of South Asian Linguistics
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Structure of Verbs in Malto
Full text linkMalto is a North Dravidian language spoken in Eastern India. It is an agglutinating language with SOV word order and suffixing morphology. The finite verb word in Malto maximally carries information about valence adjusting operations, tense-aspect-mood, negation and gender-number-person agreement with the subject. The non-finite verbs take suffixes marking adverbialisation, complementation, relativisation, participialisation and relative tense. Syntactically, there is only one finite verb in a sentence and all the other verbs preceding it are non-finite. This paper is a descriptive analysis of the structure of Malto verbs and an outcome of a language documentation project with the intention of describing the formal structure of the Suariya Pahariya variety of Malto. This work is a follow up on grammatical accounts on Malto by Doerse (1884), Das (1973) and Mahapatra (1979)
The Unaccusativity/Unergativity Distinction in Urdu
Full text linkoai:ojs.katze.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de:article/1The article discusses the classification of intransitive verbs into two distinct classes, i.e. unaccusative and unergative (Perlmutter 1978, Burzio 1981, 1986). Burn, fall, drop, sink etc. having patient/theme subject, are supposed to be unaccusative verbs. Work, play, speak, smile etc., having agentive subject, are supposed to be unergative verbs. The unergative/unaccusative distinction has been shown to exist crosslinguistically and language specific tests have been proposed as diagnostics. We find tests for unaccusativity/unergativity distinction for Urdu/Hindi too. On the other hand, we find that there are many Urdu/Hindi intransitives that act both like unaccusatives as well as unergatives in different semantic contexts. Different authors have pointed out this fact for other languages especially of Romance and Germanic families ((Van Valin 1990, Zaenen 1993, Keller and Sorace 2003). This article therefore proposes to abandon a strict two-way distinction between unaccusatives and unergatives and proposes semantic features to model the validity/invalidty of different syntactic constructions involving intransitive verbs
Why Things May Move: Evidence from (Circumstantial) Control
Full text linkIn the Minimalist Program, movement is considered to be driven by feature checking. An element moves in order to check a feature of its own or a feature on the target (Lasnik 1995). This paper presents evidence from Forward/Backward Adjunct Control in Telugu, a Dravidian language, to show that movement may also be triggered by the feature requirements of the head of the maximal projection that dominates the moving element. The analysis, if correct, may be a solution to a major problem faced by the Movement Theory of Control: What triggers the movement of the subordinate subject in a control structure
Subject distribution and Finiteness in Tamil and Other Languages: selection vs. Case
No full textThis paper presents an alternative account of DP distribution that is based on DPs being selected rather than being Case-theoretically licensed. We argue that the fundamental prediction made by Case theory, namely that obligatorily controlled pro and overt DPs are in complementary distribution, is not empirically justified. To this end, we provide data from non-finite clausal adjuncts, complements and gerundivals in Tamil where subject controlled pro and overt subject DPs seem to alternate in free variation. We further illustrate, with supporting evidence from Malayalam, Sinhala, Latin, Irish, andMiddle English as well as the Present-Day English gerundival construction, that this type of problematic alternation is not a language-specific quirk but a widely attested crosslinguistic phenomenon. While standard Case theories are equipped to handle either the occurrence of pro or that of an overtsubject, they are unable to consistently handle the alternation between both types of elements. Our selection analysis is designed to handle the alternations as well as instances where only one DP typeis allowed
Adjunct Control in Telugu: Exceptions as Non-Exceptions
Full text linkSouth Asian languages license control into adjuncts known as conjunctive participle clauses. At thesame time, these languages allow exceptions to adjunct control. These exceptions have received veryfew, mainly semantic, analyses in the literature. This paper focuses on one South Asian language,Telugu, and offers a syntactic analysis. It shows that the so-called exceptions to adjunct controlare non-exceptions and that they are instances of Expletive Control that involve two unaccusativepredicates. The proposal is not without challenges. One challenge comes from English that does notallow Expletive Control. The article spells out the English details and shows that they do not createa problem for the Telugu data
Innovations in the negative conjugation of the Brahui verb system
Full text linkThis paper discusses innovations in the Brahui verbal system which involve interaction between the increasingly used progressive forms, and recent changes in the negative infinitives. It is based on field materials gathered in 1990-91 and supplemented with more recent dat
Performative Sentences and the Morphosyntax-Semantics Interface in Vedic
Full text linkPerformative sentences represent a particularly intriguing type of self-referring assertive clauses, as they constitute an area of linguistics where the relationship between the semantic-grammatical and the pragmatic-contextual dimension of language is especially transparent. This paper examines how the notion of performativity interacts with different tense, aspect and mood categories in Vedic. The claim is that one may distinguish three slightly different constraints on performative sentences, a modal constraint demanding that the proposition is represented as being in full accordance with the Common Ground, an aspectual constraint demanding that there is a coextension relation between event time and reference time and a temporal constraint demanding that the reference time is coextensive with speech time. It is shown that the Archaic Vedic present indicative, aorist indicative and aorist injunctive are quite compatible with these constraints, that the basic modal specifications of present and aorist subjunctive and optative violate the modal constraint on performative sentences, but give rise to speaker-oriented readings which in turn are compatible with that constraint. However, the imperfect, the present injunctive, the perfect indicative and the various modal categories of the perfect stem are argued to be incompatible with the constraints on performative sentences
