Traces of Syntactic Ergativity in the History of Western New Indo-Aryan Languages

Abstract

The paper describes the relationship between historical changes in syntactic coding strategies and the rules of co-referential deletion in the history of Western Indo-Aryan languages. It will be shown that the evolution from nominative-accusative to ergative type, and then a partial return to the nominative-accusative model of syntactic coding manifested itself not only in morphological marking and verbal agreement, but also in the domain of syntactic ergativity — the rules of clausal combination and co-referential deletions. The nominative-accusative strategy of syntactic coding was typical for Old Indo-Aryan period. In the Middle Indo-Aryan it was replaced by a “split” ergative one: sentences with perfective verbal forms were structured according to the ergative model. The Middle Indo-Aryan and the beginning of the New Indo-Aryan period show the most consistent features of morphological ergativity. In the course of historical development, the ergative strategy (S=P≠A) gives way to a neutral one (S=P=A), then a contrastive one (S≠P≠A), which in a significant part of Rajasthani nominal paradigms, as well as in Punjabi pronominal paradigms, was later replaced by accusative system of case marking (S=A≠P). Middle and early New Indo-Aryan languages demonstrated both the peak of morphological ergativity and various deviations from the classical accusative model of clause combinations and coreferential deletions. Later, with the transition to a contrastive and nominative-accusative system of case marking, the rules of clausal combination and coreferential deletions acquired a consistently accusative character. Middle and early New Indo-Aryan languages had one more feature of syntactic ergativity: the Agent in ergative construction was only a secondary figure in the sentence and could be easily omitted. In most modern Western NIA languages Agent omission is impossible.

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