Table Of Content112
Typological Studies in Language
Indo-Aryan Ergativity
in Typological and
Diachronic Perspective
edited by
Eystein Dahl and Krzysztof Stron´ski
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Indo-Aryan Ergativity in Typological and Diachronic Perspective
Typological Studies in Language (TSL)
issn 0167-7373
A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this
series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in
language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and
language typologies.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
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Editors
Spike Gildea Fernando Zúñiga
University of Oregon University of Bern
Editorial Board
Balthasar Bickel John Haiman Marianne Mithun
Zurich St Paul Santa Barbara
Bernard Comrie Martin Haspelmath Doris L. Payne
Santa Barbara Jena Eugene, OR
Denis Creissels Bernd Heine Franz Plank
Lyon Köln Konstanz
William Croft Andrej A. Kibrik Dan I. Slobin
Albuquerque Moscow Berkeley
Nicholas Evans František Lichtenberk† Sandra A. Thompson
Canberra Auckland Santa Barbara
Carol Genetti
Santa Barbara
Volume 112
Indo-Aryan Ergativity in Typological and Diachronic Perspective
Edited by Eystein Dahl and Krzysztof Stroński
Indo-Aryan Ergativity
in Typological
and Diachronic Perspective
Edited by
Eystein Dahl
UiT – The Arctic University of Norway
Krzysztof Stroński
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/tsl.112
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2016001802 (print) / 2016016009 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 0693 0 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6716 0 (e-book)
© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Ergativity in Indo-Aryan and beyond 1
Eystein Dahl & Krzysztof Stroński
Looking for ergativity in Indo-Aryan 39
Saartje Verbeke & Eva De Clercq
The origin and development of the Old Indo-Aryan
predicated -tá construction 61
Eystein Dahl
On the establishment of ergative alignment during the
Late Middle Indo-Aryan period 109
Vit Bubenik
Why the ergative case in modal (in)transitive clauses? The historical
evolution of aspect, modality, ergative and locative in Indo-Aryan 133
Annie Montaut
Ergative alignment in Western New Indo-Aryan languages
from a historical perspective 165
Liudmila V. Khokhlova
The restoration of the ergative case marking of ‘A’ in perfective
clauses in New Indo-Aryan: The case of the Braj language 201
Andrea Drocco
Syntactic lability vs. ergativity in Indo-Aryan 237
Krzysztof Stroński
Language Index 259
General Index 261
Author Index 265
Ergativity in Indo-Aryan and beyond*
Eystein Dahl & Krzysztof Stroński
UiT – The Arctic University of Norway & Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
This chapter gives an overview of the current state of the art of research
on ergativity in Indo-Aryan. First, it discusses a number of theoretical and
terminological issues concerning synchronic and diachronic dimensions of
ergative alignment and outlines a typology for exploring the relationship between
ergativity and other alignment types with particular reference to the South-
Asian linguistic area. Second, it provides an overview of the Modern Indo-Aryan
languages showing ergative alignment in parts of their verbal system and of
the striking variation in this domain. Third, it explores the various hypotheses
regarding the origin and development of ergative alignment in Indo-Aryan.
1. Introduction
Ergativity is a recurring alignment construction type that has enjoyed consid-
erable scholarly attention during the last decades. A great number of languages
displaying ergative morphosyntax have scanty or no written history. Among the
languages of the world, Indo-Iranian, Georgian and to some extent Basque rep-
resent some of the few cases where it is possible to study ergative morphosyntax
over an extended period of time. Therefore, a broad diachronic-typological study
of this alignment type based on evidence from different chronological stages and
geographic varieties of Indo-Aryan seems highly motivated. The present volume
represents one step in this direction and aims at delineating some central prob-
lems as well as giving a rough outline of the current state of the art within this field
of research. Since Indo-Iranian (IIR) generally and Indo-Aryan (IA) in particular
has the privilege of being attested in written form across a very large time span
it presents a rich array of pertinent data for the study of ergativity in general and
* This chapter is the result of a fruitful collaboration over the last several years between
the two authors. Although both have contributed to all of its parts, Eystein Dahl takes main
responsibility for Sections 2, 4.2 and 4.3 and Krzysztof Stroński for Sections 3 and 4.1. We are
grateful to Spike Gildea for critical comments and constructive suggestions. All remaining
weaknesses are due to our own shortcomings.
doi 10.1075/tsl.112.01dah
© 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Eystein Dahl & Krzysztof Stroński
its diachronic dimension in particular. Even though the present volume has been
exclusively devoted to one language family, the variety of research questions and
problems pursued by the authors make the volume rather heterogeneous. This
chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 deals with a number of theoretical and
terminological issues central to the study of ergativity with particular regard to
the IA languages. Section 3 presents the distribution of ergative patterns in IA.
Section 4 discusses some theories on the origin and development of the ergative
alignment pattern in IA. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the discussion in the previ-
ous sections of the paper.
2. Typological aspects of ergativity
Ergativity is a cross-linguistically recurring type of alignment pattern. In this
work, we understand alignment as the syntactic relation between the core argu-
ments of one- and two-place verbs. Specifically, some languages, like Latin, show
so-called accusative alignment, that is, they use the same means to express the
subject argument of transitive clauses (henceforth A) and the subject argument
of intransitive clauses (henceforth S) and a different means to express the object
argument of transitive clauses (henceforth O). Other languages, like Basque, mark
S and O in an identical way, using other means to express A. Other alignment
types include neutral alignment where A, S and O are not formally distinguished,
tripartite alignment where each of the arguments are expressed in a manner dis-
tinct from the other two. Finally, some languages show a typologically rather rare
alignment type where A and O are identified, while S shows different case marking
(cf. Payne 1980; Stroński 2010). This alignment type is sometimes labelled ‘double
oblique’ (cf. Bubenik 1998, this volume). Table 1 gives a schematic representation
of these five types of alignment.
Table 1. Major alignment types
Accusative Ergative Neutral Tripartite Double oblique
A=S≠O A≠S=O A=S=O A≠S≠O A=O≠S
The notation A, S and O is widespread in the typological literature and the clas-
sification seemingly goes back at least to Dixon (1972). Dixon (1979: 1; 1994: 6)
alternatively defines these categories as universal ‘syntactic’ functions or as uni-
versal ‘syntactic-semantic’ categories, and regards them as tools employable in
typological comparison as well as language-specific description. However, while
they have proven very useful for typological aims, it is dubious to what extent
Ergativity in Indo-Aryan and beyond 3
they are sufficiently fine-grained to be fruitfully applicable in the description of
individual languages (cf. Haspelmath 2011). Thus, we regard these categories as
universal syntactic functions with a comparative-typological scope, along the lines
of C omrie (1989: 104–116).1
At this juncture, we would like to point out that the various types of align-
ment patterns illustrated in Table 1 may differ with regard to two morphological
parameters, case marking and agreement, as well as various syntactic processes
or rules referring to the core arguments (cf. e.g. Dixon 1979; 1994). Significantly,
case marking and agreement appears to represent independent parameters, as
some languages show ergative case marking and ergative agreement, i.e. S and O
agree with the verb, some languages show ergative case marking and nominative
agreement, i.e. A and S agree with the verb, and some languages show nominative
case marking and ergative agreement. All of these patterns occur in Indo-Aryan,
the first type being most frequent, the second type only occurring in Nepali and
Old Dakkhini and the third type occurring in Marwari (Bickel 2008; Gildea &
Castro Alves 2010; Magier 1983; Khokhlova 1995; Stroński 2011 and the paper
in this volume). In some cases, we even find agreement splits between A and
O or O-V person agreement, a combination which Trask (1979) claimed to be
impossible.
Regarding marking of A in languages showing ergative alignment there are
two paradigmatic options. Either a language has developed an independent erga-
tive case or its ergative case shows syncretism with some other case category,
e.g. the instrumental, genitive, dative or locative. In order to account for these
types of syncretism patterns, Klimov (1983) introduced a fourth argument type
OBL in addition to Dixon’s A, S and O, arguing that ergative languages identi-
fied A and OBL. This idea is in line with Meščaninov (1967), who distinguished
between ‘independent’ and ‘combining’ ergative, where independent ergativity
was regarded as a relatively late stage of ergativity or nominativization (cf. Klimov
1973: 186–187; 1983: 112) whereas the latter was regarded as a relatively young
stage of ergativity. This idea has found some support in Caucasian data and, sig-
nificantly, appears to be a reasonable way to account for the development of the
ergative syntax in IA as well (cf. Section 4 below).2
1. Note that Comrie (1989 and elsewhere) uses the notification P instead of O. Since Comrie’s
P appears to be a notational variant of Dixon’s O, we have chosen to stick to Dixon’s original
notation.
2. We refer to Palancar’s recent study (2002) for a thorough discussion of ergative syncretism
in cross-linguistic perspective.
