The rise of ergativity in Hindi: Assessing the role of grammaticalization
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Saartje Verbeke
This article investigates the origins and development of the ergative patterning in Hindi. Following traditional Indo-Aryan scholarship, two evolutions are discerned: (i) the reanalysis of a passive as an ergative construction, and (ii) the development of an ergative case marker ne. Three different hypotheses have been postulated in the literature to account for the latter change, two of which suggest a grammaticalization path: the first argues for a case marker as a possible source, the second points towards a lexical source. The third hypothesis maintains that language contact is involved in the change. We scrutinize all three hypotheses and conclude that the ne-clitic is borrowed from Old Rajasthani and introduced in analogy to other clitics, which were already in use as reinforcers of existing case functions. We argue furthermore that the rise of the ergative marker can only be adequately explained in relation to the constructional change in (i). Drawing on the traditional account which traces the origins of the ergative construction back to a former passive construction through reanalysis, we argue that it was actually this constructional reanalysis that allowed the introduction of an ergative marker in the language.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Inflectional classifiers in Weining Ahmao: Mirror of the history of a people
- The historical development of [g] and [b] in a regional German dialect
- More on the idiosyncrasy of Dan Michel's Ayenbite of Inwit: Behove as a (modal) verb of necessity
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- The rise of ergativity in Hindi: Assessing the role of grammaticalization
- Tigrinya, an “African-Semitic” language
- Bjarke Frellesvig & John Whitman eds.: Proto-Japanese. (Series IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Volume 294)
- Franck Floricic, ed.: La négation dans les langues romanes (Linguisticæ investigationes: Supplementa 26)
- Ives Goddard: The Autobiography of a Meskwaki Woman. A New Edition and Translation
- H. Christophe Wolfart, ed.: Papers of the Thirty-Eighth Algonquian Conference
