Paths of Typological Evolution of the New Indo-Aryan Languages

Abstract

The paper attempts to analyze the ways of typological evolution of four Western New Indo-Aryan (NIA) languages: Hindi-Urdu, Rajasthani, Punjabi and Gujarati. In the majority of Western NIA languages the consistent ergative strategy typical for the beginning of its development later gave way to the neutral, then — to the contrastive one, which was replaced in some paradigms by the accusative system of case marking. Multidirectional processes of morphosyntactic evolution were observed at the beginning of the New Indian period. Later the changes in coding strategies as well as the changes in rules of verbal agreement became predominantly unidirectional. In certain languages, the ergative construction maintained the gendernumber agreement with the marked direct object, in others the marked direct object blocked verbal agreement. Split ergativity, characteristic of the initial period of Indo- Aryan syntactic structure, has been preserved in most Western New Indo-Aryan languages (NIA). The only exception is Dakhini where the ergative case marking got initially extended to the entire system of aspectual and tense forms, later the system returned to the nominative-accusative type. Typical for ergative systems free elision of the ergative agent got established in Apabhramsha in the beginning of the NIA period (14–15 centuries), but practically does not appear in modern languages. Co-referential omissions of ergative type were observed in Middle Indo-Aryan and in Early NIA periods, in modern NIA languages they are ungrammatical. So, with the exception of minor deviations, the evolution of the morphosyntactic systems of Western NIA languages shows a unidirectional movement towards decrease in the ergative morphology and syntax.

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