Many of the Indo-Aryan languages are characterized by morphological
ergativity. This contribution briefly surveys the types of ergative
patterns and the particular case markers that are employed in the
Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia. The synchronic discussion is
followed by a look at what has been proposed for the historical
development of ergativity in these languages.
The ergative marker was first named as a special marker for subjects with reference to Caucausian languages such as Georgian (Dirr 1928). The same type of case marker had been noted for languages such as Basque and Greenlandic (Pott 1873), but was generally referred to as an ``agentive nominative'' in opposition to a ``neutral nominative'', i.e. what we simply call nominative or absolutive today. The semantic parameter of agentivity that had been noted consistently by the linguists of the last century in connection with the ergative has been replaced by a purely structural division in this century.
The standard formulation of the conception of ergativity goes
back to Fillmore (1968). Plank (1979:4) concisely summarizes the
basic idea as follows:
a. A grammatical pattern or process shows ergative alignment if it identifies intransitive subjects (Si) and transitive direct objects (dO) as opposed to transitive subjects (St).
b.It shows accusative alignment if it identifies Si and St as opposed to dO.
According to this idea, languages can be grouped into several types, based
on the case marking displayed by subjects and objects. This is
illustrated by the following table.
Clause Type | Language Type | ||
---|---|---|---|
Ergative | Accusative | Active | |
Transitive | Erg-Nom | Nom-Acc | Erg-Nom |
Intransitive (Unaccusative) | Nom | Nom | Nom |
Intransitive (Unergative) | Nom | Nom | Erg |
As far as we know, all the Indo-Aryan languages which have an ergative
case fall under the "active" type of language. We exemplify this on
the basis of Urdu/Hindi. (Hindi is spoken in the northern part of
India and is written with the Devanagari script. Urdu is spoken in
Pakistan and the northern part of India and is written with the Arabic
script. Despite these and some differences in vocabulary, the two
languages are structurally identical.) (1) shows a transitive clause
with an ergative, (2) an unaccusative intransitive where no ergative
is possible, and (3) shows an unergative intransitive where the
ergative is optional and generally signals a degree of agentivity.
(1) | ram=ne | gari | cala-yi | (hai) | |
Ram.M.Sg=Erg | car.F.Sg.Nom | drive-Perf.F.Sg | be.Pres.3.Sg | ||
`Ram has driven a/the car.' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
(2) | ram/*ram=ne | ga-ya | |
Ram.M.Nom/Ram.M=Erg | go-Perf.M.Sg | ||
`Ram went.' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
(3a) | ram | kHaNs-a | |
Ram.M.Nom | cough-Perf.M.Sg | ||
`Ram coughed.' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
(3b) | ram=ne | kHaNs-a | |
Ram.M=Erg | cough-Perf.M.Sg | ||
`Ram coughed (purposefully).' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
None of the Indo-Aryan languages exhibit "syntactic ergativity". Syntactic ergativity is found in some languages, such as the Australian language Dyirbal (Dixon 1994). Syntactically ergative languages encode the ergative pattern purely structurally. However, most languages are morphologically ergative in that pieces of the morphology serve to mark the ergative or active pattern. The Indo-Aryan languages fall under this class.
Agreement patterns vary from language to language. In Urdu/Hindi
the verb can only agree with NPs which are direct arguments and which
do not bear overt case marking. While most Indo-Aryan languages
appear to follow this pattern by disallowing agreement with a
non-nominative argument, some languages allow it. Nepali, for instance
allows agreement with an ergative subject, while in Gujarati, the verb
agrees with the direct object, whether accusative marked or unmarked,
when the subject of the clause is ergative. Examples (4) and (5) illustrate
the Nepali and Gujarati patterns, respectively.
(4) | mai-le | mero | lugga | dho-en | |
I=Erg | I.M.Sg.Gen | clothes.M.Pl.Nom | wash-Perf.1.Sg | ||
`I washed my clothes.' | (Nepali) |
(5) | ram-e | gadi=ne | jo-yi | |
Ram.M.Sg=Erg | car.F.Sg=Acc | see-Perf.F.Sg | ||
`Ram has seen a/the car.' | (Gujarati) |
Ergative morphology in most Indo-Aryan
languages furthermore shows a split along the lines of tense/aspect. We
again illustrate this with an
example from Urdu/Hindi. Here the ergative case marker ne is
required by perfect verb morphology. The association of ergativity
with perfect morphology is crosslinguistically well-established and is
one of the factors that has contributed to the idea that ergative
structures must arise out of passive constructions (see section below). However, not all Indo-Aryan
languages are split-ergative. Assamese, for example, does not seem to
exhibit such a split (Devi 1986).
(6) | ram | gari | cala-ta | (hai) | |
Ram.M.Sg.Nom | car.F.Sg.Nom | drive-Impf.M.Sg | be.Pres.3.Sg | ||
`Ram drives a car.' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
(7) | ram=ne | gari | cala-yi | (hai) | |
Ram.M.Sg=Erg | car.F.Sg.Nom | drive-Perf.F.Sg | be.Pres.3.Sg | ||
`Ram has driven a/the car.' | (Urdu/Hindi) |
Another very common split crosslinguistically is the so-called
NP-split, whereby only a subset of the nominals may display ergative
morphology. Urdu/Hindi does not display this kind of a split, but it
can be found in the closely related language of Punjabi, for
example. In Punjabi, the first and second person pronouns are not
marked for ergativity, whereas third persons are (pronouns as well as
nominals).
(8a) | maiN | kamm | kita | |
I.Nom | work.M.Sg.Nom | do.Past.M.Sg | ||
`I did some/the work.' | (Punjabi, based on Bhatia 1993) |
(8b) | o=ne | kamm | kita | |
Pron.3.Sg=Erg | work.M.Sg.Nom | do.Past.M.Sg | ||
`He/She did some/the work.' | (Punjabi, based on Bhatia 1993) |
Not all Indo-Aryan languages show ergative
patterning. Historically, the construction which the ergative pattern
is based on was inherited by all the modern languages from the parent
language, Sanskrit. However, not all the modern languages have
retained this pattern. Notably, a difference may be observed in the
Western and the Eastern vernaculars, where the Western subgroup
consisting of languages such as Urdu/Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati
retain the ergative marking pattern, while the Eastern subgroup,
consisting of languages such as Bengali, Oriya and some dialects of
Eastern Hindi have lost this pattern and display a uniform accusative
pattern in all tenses and aspects. Older variants of these languages,
Old Bengali, for instance, still show ergative patterning in the
perfect aspect. This pattern is lost in the modern language, as
illustrated
in example (9), which documents the absence of ergative morphology in
the modern Bengali perfect aspect.
(9) | ami | sita=ke | dekh-lam | ||
I-Sg.Nom | Sita.F.Sg.Acc | see-Perf.1.Sg | |||
`I saw Sita.' | (Bengali) |
Ergative case markers in Indo-Aryan take a variety of forms. Here
we show a selection and compare the ergative markers to dative markers
of the same languages in order to show that some of the forms appear
to have a marked similarity (this preshadows some of the discussion in
the next section).
Dative Ergative (subjects and objects) (subjects
only) Hindi/Urdu ko ne Punjabi nuN ne Sindhi kHe OBLIQUE INFLECTION Gujarati ne -e Marathi la ne/ni Bengali ke NONE Oriya ku NONE Assamese ko/no -e Nepali lai le
Some of the ergative markers are inflectional. These are prefixed
with an "-". All the others presumably function as clitics, as in
Urdu/Hindi (Butt and King 2001, Sharma 1999).
There are several theories as to the origin of the ergative in
Indo-Aryan. Most of the discussions take Urdu/Hindi as a
representative language. In this section, we give a short overview of
the proposals, along with some commentary.
Ergative as Passive The early (Western) linguistic literature on South-Asian languages (18th-19th century) refers to the ergative alternatively as an agentive or instrumental. Because the ergative in many languages has connotations of agency and shares features with an instrumental, the ergative construction was first analyzed as a passive in many languages (see Trask 1979:390 for some discussion). However, this view soon became a minority view due to detailed language-specific work, which showed that more often than not, ergatives were subjects of active sentences.
Passive/Participle to Ergative With respect to language change, the connection to a passive forms the basis for a hypothesis that ergative constructions arise from former passive constructions via a reanalysis of the following type:
NPinstr NPnom V > NPerg NPnom V (adapted from Garrett 1990:265)
The precise morphology involved on the verb was a -ta participle in Sanskrit which has either been lost or retained as a glide or an -e in most of the modern Indo-Aryan languages. The Sanskrit -ta participle finds its origin in the Proto Indo-European deverbal adjective in *-to-. In Sanskrit, the -ta formed a deverbal participle which agreed with a noun. This participle had passive interpretation with transitive verbs but active interpretation with intransitives and verbs of motion (Garrett 1990:263, Speijer 1886:280). It is indubitably the case that the modern ergative patterns occur primarily in conjunction with the verbal morphology descended from the original Sanskrit -ta. However, the precise nature of the original Sanskrit participle and its modern descendents remain the subject of debate.
Despite the possible active interpretations of the participle, the dominant idea for the for the development of ergativity in modern Indo-Aryan languages is one which sees a passive construction as being reanalyzed as an ergative. It is this proposal which has become accepted as common wisdom, despite many dissenting voices (e.g., Beames 1872, Kellogg 1893, Klaiman 1978, Zakharyin 1979, Andersen 1986, Hock 1986). Consider, for example, the quote from Dixon (1994) where this hypothesis is presented as textbook knowledge (also see Harris and Campbell (1995:263)).
We might thus expect a split ergative system conditioned by aspect or tense, where the ergative is found in perfect aspect or past tense, to be likely to have a passive origin.
This is precisely what happened in the Indic and Iranian branches of Indo-European (for which we do have written records and can be fairly certain about what happened, although different scholars have suggested diverse interpretations). [Dixon 1994:190]
The dissenting voices mentioned by Dixon range from an argument
that Sanskrit as well as modern Hindi were basically
``patient-oriented'' and thus should both be considered ergative (Hock
1986), to the interesting observation that stativity may be the
relevant factor that is coming into play (Trask 1979:397) in the sense
that a deverbal stative predicate is made active via an integration
into the inflectional paradigm into the language (see Deo 2001a for a
case study of Marathi).
Direct Descendent of the Sanskrit Instrumental -ina Both
the proponents of the passive-to-ergative view and the dissenters
(with the exception of Deo) assume that the modern Urdu/Hindi ergative
ne is a direct descendant of the original Sanskrit inflectional
instrumental -ina (and allomorphs thereof). However, the
historical facts clearly speak against such an analysis.
Researchers of the last century such as Beames (1872-79) and Kellogg (1893), are very clear on the idea that the modern Urdu/Hindi ne could not possibly be a descendant of the Sanskrit instrumental -ina. Kellogg essentially lists three main problems with the hypothesis that the ergative ne be descended from the Sanskrit -ina: erosion, timing, and usage.
The highly inflected case system of Sanskrit underwent a general collapse over the ages and the case endings eroded and fell together. According to Sen (1973:68), the instrumental -ina/-ena eroded to eN by Middle Indo-Aryan and fell together with what was left of the dative: e. It is generally agreed (e.g., Sen 1973, Beames 1872-79, Kellogg 1893) that this eN/e furnished the current oblique marker of Urdu/Hindi. We may further assume that this morpheme is the ancestor of the inflectional ergative morphology in Assamese and Gujarati (see the table above). However, this morpheme could not have been the ancestor of the other ergative forms in the table.
To take modern Urdu/Hindi ne as an example again: this form is often described as a postposition in the literature (e.g., Davison 2000, Mahajan 1990). We follow Mohanan (1994) in treating it as a clitic (see Butt and King 2001 for a detailed discussion). Furthermore, as Kellogg also points out, in synchronic terms the ergative ne behaves much like other postpositions (or clitics) which are known to have developed from nouns: meN `in' and par `on'. The synchronic and diachronic data therefore seem to point to a relatively normal path of development: the instrumental -ina eroded away and the ergative ne came into the language as a grammaticalized form of a noun. On the other hand, the commonly assumed development from the inflectional morpheme -ina to a clitic (or postposition) ne would need to involve degrammaticalization, a highly unusual form of historical development and one which cannot be substantiated by the known synchronic and diachronic facts.
Another problem with the -ina to ne hypothesis is the relatively late appearance of the ergative in High Hindi. Beames (1872-79:267-271) surveys Old-Hindi writers like Chand, Kabir, Tulsi Das and Behari Lal and finds that he cannot trace the ergative ne back to more than 200-300 years ago (1600-1700). The writers he surveyed tend to use the oblique form -e (the old instrumental) of nouns/pronouns in constructions that today would be termed ``ergative''. The question then arises, if an ``ergative'' pattern based on the old instrumental was already in place, why then introduce a new marker into the language?
Beames (1872-79:270) traces the modern ergative ne to a dative form neN that was used in a dialect of Hindi spoken in provinces adjacent to the Moghul court during the reign of the Moghul Emperor Shah Jehan (1627-1658). Beames sees this time period as a very likely one because a change in administrative policies led to an influx of Hindu administrators, who might have put their stamp on the language of the court. Beames does not say which dialect the dative ne could have been borrowed from.
The precise origin of the non-inflectional forms of the ergative in
the table above thus remains to be
determined.
Language Contact Zakharyin (1979) ascribes the Urdu/Hindi
ergative form ne to language contact with Tibeto-Burman, who
use an ergative form na. However, this hypothesis does not
explain why Nepali, a language which is geographically very close to
the Tibeto-Burman languages, would employ le as an ergative
marker (Devyani Sharma, p.c., August 2000).
Historical Stability Butt 2001, on the other hand, proposes
that ne might be a reduced form of the Sanskrit locative
janiye `for the sake of, because of, caused by' (based on a
suggestion by Aditi Lahiri, p.c., December 1999). The semantics of
this form are compatible with both agentive and dative
(goal/benefactive) uses and as such this noun may have given rise to
both dative and ergative forms in the table
shown above.
Butt further proposes that the ergative pattern in modern Urdu/Hindi
is an instance of historical stability rather than an example of a
radical accusative-to-ergative shift. This is based on the idea that
the original Sanskrit -ta participle already formed an
"ergative" pattern in the sense that the logical subject was marked
nominative with intransitives, inceptives and verbs of motion, but
instrumental with all others. This pattern has simply been retained
in the modern language, though instantiated through new case morphology.
This idea is consonant with Hock's 1986 claim that both Sanskrit and
Hindi were essentially patient oriented and that in terms of this
basic property, no historical change has taken place.
Ergativity as Licensed by the Development of IP In contrast,
Deo 2001a argues that the historical development of ergativity in
modern Indo-Aryan languages can be explained by a cross-linguistically
attested historical shift: the development of a more articulated
phrase structure in the form of an IP. This study looks at syntactic
and morphological data from Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and
Marathi, one of the modern Indo-Aryan languages.
The analysis rests on the crucial assumption that loss of morphology in a language (or language family) triggers phrase structural changes. The introduction of functional categories in compensation for the reduced functionality of inflectional morphology has been argued to be a general tendency in Indo-European syntactic change and this has been discussed in detail for Middle English and Greek (Kiparsky 2000, Kiparsky 1996). The hypothesis that Indo-Aryan also confirms to a similar trajectory is supported by the following syntactic and morphological changes in the language family, exemplified by a representative language, Marathi.
(10) | na | shoko | na | jara | tasyam | |
NEG | affliction.M.Nom.Sg | NEG | old age.F.Nom.Sg | her.F.Loc.Sg | ||
`There (is) no affliction or old age in her.' | (Sanskrit) |
(11) | shabdu | bole | mukhe | pari | dnyaan | naahi | |
word.M.Nom.Sg. | speak.Pres.M.3.Sg. | mouth.N.Inst.Sg | but | knowledge.N.Nom.Sg | be.NEG.Pres.3.Sg | ||
`(He) speaks with his mouth, but there is no knowledge.' (Old Marathi) |