Volume 5, Issue 2 -

We provide a functional analysis of the grammatical gender system of Marathi (Indo-Aryan) in Western India. The majority of the new Indo-Aryan languages typically classifies each noun of the lexicon according to biological gender as masculine and feminine. Only a few Indo-Aryan languages such as Marathi diverge in terms of agreement pattern by categorizing nouns as masculine, feminine, and neuter. Yet gender in Marathi has not been extensively described in terms of functions. We thus use apply functional typology to analyze grammatical gender in Marathi and provide detailed examples of its lexical and discourse functions.

This paper discusses the agreement system of five Kuki-Chin (KC) languages of Barak valley, viz. Saihriem, Hrangkhol, Chorei, Sakachep, and Ronglong. The paper has an introduction, and five sections dedicated to agreement in different contructions: intransitive structures, transitive structures, agreement with the same person, agreement with ditransitive verbs, and agreement in hortative and imperative constructions. The discussion of agreement is further divided into subparts by paradigm; non-future, future and negative; and by languages. As in most KC languages, the Barak valley KC languages exhibit both preverbal and postverbal agreement clitics. The preverbal agreement clitics are homophonous with the possessive pronouns which occur before a noun. In intransitive constructions, the future affirmative paradigm has the same subject agreement clitics as the non-future paradigm. But unlike the non-future paradigm, the agreement clitics occur mostly after the verb and before the future tense marker in the future paradigm. In intransitive constructions, the postverbal agreement clitic shows up only in the future negative paradigm. As in the case of preverbal agreement clitics, the subject NP of an intransitive verb in the future negative paradigm can be dropped, and it can be recovered from its corresponding postverbal agreement clitics. Across the Barak valley KC languages, a transitive verb agrees with its object for the 1st person. Saihriem is the only language which shows number distinction for the second person object. If a verb takes more than one object, one with an inanimate direct object and the other with an indirect human object, the human indirect object takes precedence over the inanimate direct object for agreement. The Imperative construction takes the regular pre-verbal subject agreement marker for 1st and 3rd person in both the singular and plural form. On the contrary, the second person does not take any agreement marker. However, the number (singular and plural of the person) is distinguished in the imperative marker itself.

In this paper, a prosodic account of word-final vowel lengthening in the Rigveda is given. It is argued that word-final lengthening, lengthening in compounds, and lengthening before pada-suffixes are instantiations of one and the same phonological process. This process targets the right edge of prosodic words if this edge does not align with the edge of a higher prosodic constituent. A functional account and an explicit analysis in an Optimality Theory framework are given and the proposal is strengthened by adducing typological parallels. The rhythmic patterns emerging from lengthening are shown to be epiphenomena. In the last section, the proposal is extended to lengthening in reduplicants and tentatively to word final lengthening in n -stem vocatives.