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Home › Languages › Hindi

Hindi

Glottocode: hind1269

Genalogical classification: Indo-European

Original alignment pattern: Nominative

Source construction: Resultative intransitive construction with a participial form and accusative alignment, with S arguments marked by the nominative case and verb agreement and A encoded as an oblique with instrumental case marking.

Developmental mechanism: The resultative construction is reanalyzed as active construction: the oblique NP becomes an A argument, the S argument becomes a P argument (1).

Resulting construction: A transitive construction with ergatively marked A and unmarked P that triggers agreement on the verb.

Type of change: Reinterpretation of argument structure

Alignment in the resulting construction: Ergative-Absolutive

Global alignment pattern following the change: TAM-based split alignment

Constraints on the distribution of the resulting alignment: The ergative pattern is restricted to the past tense.

Grammatical domains: Verbal indexation, Case marking

Symmetry: Symmetric

Type of data: Historical data

References: Dahl & Stroński 2016, Verbecke & De Cuypere 2009

Comments:
We refer to Dahl & Stroński (2016) for a thorough discussion of alternative interpretations of the status of the source construction in Old Indo-Aryan. Note also that it is not clear whether the ergative postposition =ne of Modern Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi in (2), is a direct continuant of the Old Indo-Aryan instrumental case marking -eṇa in (1) (see Verbecke & De Cuypere 2009).