LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Interaction of Case and Aspect: A Comparative Study of Hindi and Nepali 

Raj Laxmi Singh

PhD, JNU

My research topic is ‘The Interaction of Case and Aspect: A Comparative Study of Hindi and Nepali’. The proposal is to work out the aspect related licensing of case, in particular ergativity and also the agreement patterns in the two languages. Ergativity, in both the languages, is generally restricted to the transitive sentences. The two languages vary in the fact that in Hindi the ergative subject is licensed only in the sentences with past perfective aspect, while, in Nepali sometimes the subject of a habitual sentence may also be ergative. It is usually the case with some repeated action and my understanding is that this is due to the repetition of an activity that ended at one time and was again taken up; there is a natural hiatus, an end point of a unit similar to the end of a single event in the past perfective. Another line of difference is that the ergative in Hindi shows no agreement with the main verb whereas in Nepali it does. This requires a new understanding of the agreement phenomenon which I am working towards in my study.  The adpositional nature of the case markings requires a brief account for its development synchronically as well as the syntactic consequences of them. Syncretism of case and dative subjects are also dealt with in order to understand the different forms in which a subject can occur what can be the reasons (syntactic and semantic) for this difference.

LISSIM V was a mixed experience regarding the topics that were dealt with and not everything fell into my area of research. Though, the new ideas that were presented helped me delve into some deeper questions pertaining to the nature of nominals and morphological case.

The DP/NP debate by Bos<kovicæ which incorporated the idea that TP is the clausal counterpart of DP and thus an article-less language lacks a TP as well has important consequences on case licensing. Since nominative case has been said to be licensed on a nominal which moves to the spec of TP, the nominative case assignment in a TP lacking language would then be in a different position which according to him is the AgrsP. While working on my research study, the idea that I meditated on was that the nominative/ ergative alternation would be the result of aspect providing a different position for ergative case licensing than spec TP where nominative is assigned. Incorporating Boskovic’s idea is helpful in the fact that in Hindi, a nominal with nominative case does show agreement with the main verb whereas an ergative nominal does not. If nominative were assigned at AgrsP, ergative licensed elsewhere could be positioned beyond the AgrsP, which in Boskovic’s opinion would be a phase and thus would not allow the ergative to look within it and allow agreement of any sort. Thus, ergatives go without agreement with the main verb. This idea is immediately contradicted by the Nepali ergative which does show agreement with the main verb and thus would have to fall within the AgrsP phase. So, it drove me to inquire further into the properties of phases and the case licensing positions in the two languages. Also a novel approach to the phenomenon of Agree seems mandatory. The discussion helped me understand that the syntax of TP, IP, AgrsP and AspP is yet not fully understood and we have the liberty to break away from the conventional notions and generalizations to find answers to the problems that arise regarding them.

While attending LISSIM V, the idea that I was working on was that in Hindi a question formed with an ergative subject requires the object to precede the ergative subject. Example:

nal       kis-ne               khulaa              choRaa

tap       who-Erg          open                leave-Pst-Perf

Who left the tap running?

This might throw some light on the position in which the ergative nominal originates or is licensed. I presented this idea before Boskovic during a personal interaction and his opinion was that this might have nothing to do with the position of case licensing but, the object shift could be a focus related movement. So, though, it had not much to do directly with my research, I could still develop this view and write a separate paper on it for which he provided further references. Richards work on the prosodic requirements imposed on the movements of wh-words could be helpful in further development of this idea. This interaction also helped me a great deal in understanding how to differentiate between problems related to the core of my thesis and problems on the periphery whose answers are found elsewhere.

In cases where actual work was not very effective in improving the understanding of my research work, the method and technique adopted by the scholars did help in some ways to understand in what ways one should proceed while looking at any problem.

            Another discussion that touched on my area of research was the nanosyntax of case, which was introduced briefly by Michal Starke. Nanosyntax has been developed by Starke and the Nanosyntax of Case was illustrated by a thesis supervised by him, written by Pavel Caha. The thesis provides a case sequence according to which the elements occurring on the right side of a case marked by a preposition will inevitably be marked by a preposition too. This sequence leaves out ergative case which is taken as a non-structural case. Thus, if the idea of a nanosyntactic computation method was incorporated in my thesis, I would have to work out the position of the ergative case in the hierarchy and its effects on the sequence. The mention of ergative case comes in the hierarchy of agreement which left for further research in Caha’s work. Being a comparatively newer field of study, nanosyntax as a model and method can be helpful in working out the optimal selection of one alternative over the other and in the case of my study, say, the selection of ergative over the nominative in particular cases. This needs serious study into the mechanisms of case selection and the patterns of agreement which has not been fully introduced as of now.

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