Split-agreement and ergativity in PashtoTaylor Roberts
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AbstractPashto, a major language of Afghanistan and Pakistan, has a pattern of split-ergativity similar to that in Hindi/Urdu, except that Pashto has generally been thought to define the split on tense, rather than on aspect. This article examines Pashto's compound verbs rather closely, revealing that Pashto's ergative split is more intricate than has hitherto been noted, being determined by both tense and aspect. This dual criterion for ergativity can result in verbal agreement that is 'split' in a single sentence, one element of the verb agreeing with the object, and the other element of the verb agreeing with the subject. Although 'simple' ergativity itself poses considerable difficulties for formal accounts of sentence structure, split-ergativity obviously compounds these difficulties.1 The implication for Indo-Iranian diachrony is that Pashto has surely inherited its more complicated system from Proto-Iranian, while other languages have simplified or lost it entirely.Section 1 offers a brief sketch of Pashto morphology, before examing agreement in compound verbs in section 2. Ergativity in Pashto has been outlined in greatest detail by Tegey (1979), although he did not discuss compound verbs. For broader information on the language, such works as Penzl (1955), MacKenzie (1987), Tegey and Robson (1996), and Babrakzai (1999) may be consulted.
1. Morphology1.1. NounsNouns bear features of gender (masculine and feminine), number (singular and plural), and case (direct and oblique, which correspond to nominative/absolutive vs. ergative/accusative). These features are also reflected by the varying forms of the verbs and adjectives that agree with them. A noun such as patlun 'pants' may therefore take a variety of forms, depending on its number and grammatical role (Tegey and Robson 1996: 50):(1)
The four-way distinction exemplified by (1) is not made by all nouns; many nouns do not distinguish direct and oblique singular forms, for example. The class membership of nouns is determined largely arbitrarily, and there is little consensus on how to divide them. Tegey and Robson (1996) posit four classes of masculine nouns and three classes of feminine, while recognizing a good number of irregular forms. The two cases encode a variety of grammatical functions and, as mentioned above, display an ergative pattern in past tense. In the chart below, 'subject' is meant to refers to subjects of transitive and unergative verbs only, since subjects of unaccusative verbs behave as objects: (2)
Some members of the set of singular strong pronouns initially appear to show an additional case distinction, differentiating direct objects from objects of adpositions, as shown in the paradigm in (3) (adapted from Tegey and Robson 1996: 69). As will be explained below, however, 'accusative' is not a distinct case; the term is intended merely to identify the direct object in a present tense sentence, in order to show how case-assignment is split according to person. (3)
The identity of form of the pronouns in red suggests thatlike full NPsstrong pronouns likewise only show two case distinctions, direct and oblique. Third-person pronouns are like full NPs (which are also, of course, third-person) in receiving direct case when they are the direct object of a present tense sentence. In contrast, first- and second-person pronouns, when they are objects, receive oblique case in present tense. (The split between first- and second-person nominals vs. third-person nominals may be defined simply as being between discourse participants and non-participantsa split familiar from many languages.) As shown below, the so-called accusative 1sg and 2sg pronouns in (3) are restricted to direct object position in present tense:
Direct case is used for third-person subjects and objects in present tense, and for objects in past tense. And, also like full NPs, pronominal subjects appear in oblique (ergative) case in past tense:
If the person-split is borne in mind, the chart in (3) may therefore be simplified as follows: (6)
Whereas singular strong pronouns bear two cases, plural strong pronouns have a single form, regardless of their function in a sentence: (7)
Strong pronouns appear in the same positions as full NPs (i.e., in unmarked SOV order), as illustrated by the above sentences. A strong pronoun is used when its referent is emphasized; discourse-neutral (topic) pronouns take the form of second-position clitics. In addition to pronominals, second-position clitics include some modals and adverbials (Tegey 1977: 81):
The following paradigms illustrate that these clitics occur, informally speaking, in second position of the clause. As optional, sentence-initial items are removed, the clitics take as a host whatever other element appears initially. Here and throughout, the second-position clitics are underlined.
Pashto is fairly rigidly verb-final, and so (9d) and (10e) are of particular interest, as they illustrate that the clitic's need to have a host to its left is strong enough that it compels the verb to appear non-finally in a sentence containing only one word (the verb) other than the clitic. As we shall see in section 2, in sentences containing only a compound verb in addition to the clitic, the clitic may actually divide the parts of the compound verb when it is in perfective aspect.
1.2. VerbsThe morphological structure of simple verbs may be represented schematically as follows, with the symbol # indicating positions in which a second-position clitic potentially may appear, if the sentence has no other suitable host for the clitica situation that can arise when the verb licenses pro-drop:
Verbs have different forms depending on their tense (past vs. present) and aspect (perfective vs. imperfective), and show both subject and object agreement. Perfective aspect is productively marked by the stressed proclitic we (the vowel of which is rounded when followed by a labial consonant), while past tense is marked (on regular verbs) by the stressed suffix -el, which is also the infinitive marker. Thus, the four possible tense/aspect stems for the simple verb tarrel 'to tie' are as follows (Tegey and Robson 1996: 99): (12)
Many intransitive verbs bear the suffix -eeg in present tense, and -eed(él) in past tense. A common transitive/causative suffix is -aw. These suffixes are reduced forms of the intransitive and transitive auxiliaries, for which see (1516) below. The final element of any verb is one of the suffixes from the paradigm in (13), which agrees with relevant arguments (depending on tense and aspect) in person and number. The third-person suffixes also show gender agreement in past tense. (13)
These suffixes license pro-drop in subject position in present tense, and in object position in past tense. As mentioned earlier, past tense sentences are inflected on an ergative/absolutive pattern:
Both sentences have the same form of the direct object, in the unmarked direct case. The subject in present tense (14a) is also in direct case, resulting in a fairly rigid SOV order for some speakers, since the subject and object are not morphologically disambiguated. The ergative subject in (14b), however, appears in the marked, oblique case. The form of the verb also changes in these sentences, agreeing with the subject in (14a), but with the object in (14b): the classic ergative 'split'. In sentences with simple verbs, case and agreement are therefore correlated. For speakers having a rigid word order, past tense sentences are also SOV, as in (14b), mirroring the word order of present tense clauses. Many speakers have a freer word order, however, permitting OSV order. The stems of intransitive and transitive auxiliaries, to which the agreement suffixes in (13) are added, are listed below (Tegey 1977: 95). Although they are most commonly used to form compound verbs (the subject of the next section), they may also be used as main verbs with the respective meanings 'to become' and 'to do, to make'. (15)
(16)
Some forms of 'to be' and the auxiliaries have optional variants containing the past tense suffix el, which appears as the penultimate syllable in forms that do not already contain el (Tegey and Robson 1996: 9698). These somewhat idealized paradigms are based on the 'central' dialect of Habibullah Tegey, but in actual speech there is considerable variation, especially for vowels, both in individual speakers (due to vowel harmony and rate of speech), and in different dialects. The same is true of all languages, of course, and so Pashto is not unusual in this regard.
2. Compound verbsThe facts presented until now have suggested that only tense is relevant to ergativity. If that were the case, Pashto would appear to be unlike its better studied Indo-Iranian sister, Hindi/Urdu, which instead has aspect-conditioned ergativity (nominative/accusative case and agreement in imperfective aspect, and ergative/absolutive in perfective aspect). A detailed examination of asymmetries in clitic placement and agreement patterns in compound verbs reveals that Pashto does indeed evince asymmetries that are crucially driven by aspect.
2.1. Aspect-driven asymmetriesAdjectives and nouns combine with transitive and intransitive auxiliaries to form compound verbs, which are a fairly open class, and constitute the majority of verbs in the language. The auxiliary verb always appears at the end of the sentence, bearing the agreement suffixes listed in (13) above. Examples of compound verbs include fíker kewi 'think' (lit. 'thought do') and khkol krro 'kiss' (lit. 'kiss do'):
Although complex predicates in Indo-Iranian languages have received some attention (see Ramchand 1991 for Bangla, Butt 1995 for Urdu, and Karimi 1997a,b for Persian), such predicates in Pashto have different properties that offer insight into the language's unusual patterns of agreement and clitic placement. Compound verbs show that aspect plays a crucial role in determining syntactic and morphological constituency in Pashto. In particular, compound verbs in perfective aspect behave as two units rather than one. Three types of evidence from the behavior of compound verbs support this analysis: a morphophonological process of merger and its consequences for clitic placement (treated together in section 2.2), and split agreement (section 2.3).
2.2. Merger and clitic placementInsight into the nature of the relation between the two parts of the compound verb is offered by a morphophonological process that permits the parts of the compound to be merged into a single word. In the imperfective forms of compound verbs, when the noun or adjective ends with a consonant, the initial k of the following auxiliary is dropped, and the rest of the auxiliary is added to the noun or adjective to form a single word (Tegey and Robson 1996: 109). This is illustrated below for the compound verb 'to injure', formed from the adjective dzhóbel 'injured' and the 1sg forms of the transitive auxiliary kaw- 'to make, to do' for the four basic alternations of tense and aspect. All of the sentences in this section are from Yusufzai Pashto, and contain the second-position 2sg clitic dee, which is underlined throughout; its position offers clues regarding the structure of the compound verbs. Note also in the following sentences that ergative interpretations occur specifically in past tense, rather than in perfective aspect, as occurs in Hindi (Mahajan 1990: 7273):
In the imperfective sentences of (1920), the initial k of the auxiliary is omitted, and the compound verb forms a single word, which must be followed by the second-position 2sg clitic dee. (The clitic cannot precede the verb unless there is a sentence-initial constituent to host the clitic; see the following two chapters for ample illustration of clitic placement.) In the perfective sentences of (2122), however, the initial k of the auxiliary is retained; the two parts of the verb remain separate, and the 2sg clitic dee may either follow the complex verb or appear between its two parts. Initially, it might appear that the possibility of dropping the initial consonant of the auxiliary and fusing the compound verb into a single verb is nothing more than an artifact of the particular phonological forms within the auxiliary paradigm. In particular, fusion could not apply to the perfective auxiliaries, since their stems generally comprise a single consonant (see their forms in (1516) above), and so deletion of those onset positions would render the perfective forms identical for all the auxiliaries. In contrast, the imperfective auxiliary stems retain distinct vowels and consonants even after their initial k is deleted. Nevertheless, aspect itself may be seen more clearly to play a role in morphological fusion when the placement of second-position clitics is considered. As was shown in (2122), the second-position 2sg clitic dee may appear between the constituents of a compound verb when they form separate words. If this behavior were solely the result of morphology or phonology determining when the initial k of the auxiliary must be retained, it would be expected that in compound verbs derived from an adjective ending in a vowel (which never permit the initial k of the auxiliary to be deleted), the clitic would similarly be able to divide the constituents of the compound verb. As the following sentences show, however, this is not the case. The clitic may divide the constituents of a compound verb only when it is in perfective aspect:
Imperfective compound verbs thus behave as a single unit with respect to clitic placement, irrespective of whether the initial k of their auxiliary is deleted. Aspect itself thus plays a role in the formation of compound verbs, with imperfective (but not perfective) compound verbs being impenetrable to second-position clitics.6
2.3. Split agreementCompound verbs show that agreement is yet more complicated than suggested by the introductory remarks in section 1, since the two parts of the compound verb may agree with different constituents in the same sentence. Both parts of the compound verb agree with the object in past perfective transitive sentences, as might be expected given the pattern of ergativity that was illustrated in (14) above with a simple verb. The sentences in this section are from Yusufzai:7
At this point, the two parts of the compound verb could be regarded as a single lexical item that agrees with the object. Such a conclusion would also be supported by the agreement pattern in the present and past imperfective examples below, in which the two parts of the compound verb form a single word, and the adjectival portion is uninflected:
As explained in the previous section, since the adjectival stem of the compound verb ends in a consonant (maat 'broken'), the initial k of the transitive auxiliary kaw- is omitted, and the final consonant of the adjective forms the onset of the following syllable. The invariant form of the adjective shows that it does not agree with the object in either present or past imperfective, although the entire (derived) verb agrees with the subject in present tense (28), and with the object in past tense (29)the familiar pattern of tense-split ergativity. Evidence for disassociating subject and object agreement in a single sentence, however, comes from perfective aspect in non-past tense sentences, in which the adjectival portion of the compound verb agrees with the object, while the perfective auxiliary agrees with the subject. Present tense sentences are given in (30). The paradigm in (31) gives future tense sentences, which are created from a past perfective auxiliary and the second-position future clitic ba. These sentences show that the auxiliary verb behaves independently, and according to the usual, ergative pattern, agreeing with the object in past tense, and with the subject in non-past tense.
This split agreement pattern also appears in the imperative mood of compound verbs, which are similarly formed from both present and past perfective auxiliaries. When the imperative has a single addressee, the singular imperative suffix -a appears on the auxiliary, regardless of the gender or number of the object, while the adjectival portion of the compound verb varies with the gender and number of the intended object:8
When the imperative has a plural addressee, the auxiliary bears the 2pl suffix -ey, while the adjective continues to agree with the intended object:
Unlike agreement in indicative compound verbs, the tense of the auxiliary verb is irrelevant to agreement.
3. ConclusionAn outline of the somewhat complicated constituency of compound verbs has emerged. The patterns illustrated above are summarized below in (34). Note that the non-verbal (adjectival or nominal) element of the compound verb is either uninflected, or agrees with the object; unlike the auxiliary verb, adjectives never show subject-agreement, regardless of tense, aspect, or mood. Auxiliaries, on the other hand, must always agree with either the subject or object.
As suggested in the previous section, imperfective compound verbs (34ab) behave as a single lexical item, which is why their adjectival portion is invariably uninflected. The choice of subject vs. object agreement on the auxiliary is the usual one determined by tense: subject agreement in present tense, and object agreement in past tense. In past perfective compounds (34c), both the adjective and auxiliary agree with the object, as is to be expected in past tense, which always shows ergativity. The fact that the adjective in perfectives is inflected at all, though, distinguishes it from its counterpart in imperfectives, and shows that the two parts of the compound verb are inflected separately. Although both parts here agree with the object (since the verb is past tense), evidence for their separate status comes from non-past perfectives and imperatives (34d), since in those constructions, the two parts of the compound verb agree with different constituents of the sentence. Until now, Pashto has seemed unlike Hindi/Urdu in defining its ergative split on tense, rather than aspect. Agreement in compound verbs shows that Pashto nevertheless retains an element of aspect-driven ergativity, since adjectival object agreement is indeed defined on perfective aspect (as in Hindi/Urdu), rather than on tense. It is only the auxiliary component of the compound verb that exhibits ergativity in past tense. Agreement and case-marking thus do not exhibit a single pattern of ergativity in Pashto, as the behavior of simple verbs would suggest.
Notes1 For an initial attempt at a formal account of these structures, see Roberts (2000: ch. 2), of which this article is a revised and abridged version. The acknowledgments made there apply equally here.2 The term adposition refers as a group to prepositions, postpositions, and ambipositions. 3 In isolation, the (d) and (e) sentences are not grammatical, as they do not contain an object, either in the form of a nominal, or in the form of a clitic or verbal agreement. Jan Mohammad (p.c.) observes that these sentences are well-formed in the context of a paradigm, just as in English, one may say, for example, 'I love, you love, he loves' in order to illustrate verbal agreement, but without repeating an (irrelevant) grammatical object. Another interpretation of these sentences (Farooq Babrakzai, p.c.), which would render them grammatical (and illustrate the same pattern as above), would be to assume that they contained the 3sg accusative clitic yee (underlyingly /ee/), which would merge with the preceding 2sg clitic dee by a regular phonological process. 4 The embedded subject appears in possessive form (de Sur Gwel) because 'like' is a psych-predicate (Tegey and Robson 1996: 184188). Still other predicates require their subjects to appear as complements of locative, dative, or ablative adpositions, although the subject NPs themselves still appear in oblique case (Babrakzai 1999: ch. 7). 5 There is no good explanation at present for why the clitic may follow either the first or second word of the perfective forms, but the crucial point is illustrated by the (b) variants: simply that perfective compounds may be divided by clitics, whereas imperfective compounds may never be divided. This point will be more strikingly illustrated in the next set of sentences. 6 Tegey (1977: 9899) notes the perfective/imperfective distinction, imputing it solely to stress, but the adjectival portion of all of these verbs bears final stress. 7 Thanks to Jan Mohammad for suggesting these paradigms. 8 This paradigm is suggested by Tegey and Robson (1996: 131132), but the actual forms are from Yusufzai. The use of a past- rather than a present-tense verb for a plural addressee appears to be a quirk of Yusufzai, as the reference above states that the present perfective stem of the verb takes both singular (-a) and plural (-ey) imperative suffixes.
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