Essays raj LISSIM 6 - fosssil

LISSIM 6 June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra Selected Essays Interaction of Case and Aspect: A Comparative Study of Hindi and Nepali Raj Laxmi Singh PhD, JNU My research topic is ‘The Interaction of Case and Aspect: A Comparative Study of Hindi and Nepali’. The proposal is to work out the aspect related licensing of case, in particular ergativity and also the agreement patterns in the two languages. Ergativity, in both the languages, is generally restricted to the transitive sentences. The two languages vary in the fact that in Hindi the ergative subject is licensed only in the sentences with past perfective aspect, while, in Nepali sometimes the subject of a habitual sentence may also be ergative. It is usually the case with some repeated action and my understanding is that this is due to the repetition of an activity that ended at one time and was again taken up; there is a natural hiatus, an end point of a unit similar to the end of a single event in the past perfective. Another line of difference is that the ergative in Hindi shows no agreement with the main verb whereas in Nepali it does. This requires a new understanding of the agreement phenomenon which I am working towards in my study. The adpositional nature of the case markings requires a brief account for its development synchronically as well as the syntactic consequences of them. Syncretism of case and dative subjects are also dealt with in order to understand the different forms in which a subject can occur what can be the reasons (syntactic and semantic) for this difference. LISSIM V was a mixed experience regarding the topics that were dealt with and not everything fell into my area of research. Though, the new ideas that were presented helped me delve into some deeper questions pertaining to the nature of nominals and morphological case. The DP/NP debate by Bos