Grammatical Agreement in Hindi-Urdu and its major varieties
Pradeep Kumar Das
University of Delhi
Foreword by Bernard Comrie
The work ‘Grammatical Agreement in Hindi-Urdu and its major varieties’ is an attempt to attain a unified theory of ‘agreement system’ in typologically similar and genetically related varieties of Hindi-Urdu. The languages from different part of the globe can be typified into three major groups on the basis of the agreement system that they display: a. Languages that have only Subject-verb agreement. b. Languages that have both Subject-verb & Object-verb agreement on an alternative basis (i.e. the verb agrees with either the subject or the object in different syntactic environment). c. Languages that have primarily Subject-verb agreement, however, other actants (NPs) also find their marking on the verb due to certain pragmatic requirements of the language e.g. specificity marking, animacy factor, scale of honorificity and some patter gap in the system of pronouns or other such notional categories.
The present work has tried to unify the agreement types (a) & (c) into one system and has termed it as a SINGLE SYSTEM OF AGREEMENT and labels the agreement type (b) as a DUAL SYSTEM OF AGREEMENT. The motivation for the combining (a) & (c) into one comes from two main factors; (i) there is no change of the syntactic environment of marking the inflection of other actants (NPs) on the verb besides the subject (ii) the languages do not show overt object agreement.
With this broad classification of the agreement system into two major types, the thesis examines the ‘agreement phenomenon’ in the varieties of Hindi-Urdu e.g. Avadhi, Bundeli, Chhattisgarhi, Garhwali, Marwari, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Angika (Khortha). Unlike other work in the field, this work pays proper attention on the types and nature of different clauses to justify the above mentioned classification.
ISBN 9783895867736. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 33. 270pp. 2006.
