A Paradigm Gap in Urdu
This work addresses a specific linguistic problem in Urdu and Hindi grammar, providing insights into diachronic language change, but it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge of verb-aspect interactions.
The paper identifies a paradigm gap in Urdu where the perfective form of the -ya: kar construction, once common in 19th century literature, is now ungrammatical in modern Urdu and Hindi. Through historical text analysis, corpus studies, and native speaker evaluations, it shows this shift results from a morphosyntactic conflict between the construction's requirements and transitive perfective case assignment rules.
In this paper, we document a paradigm gap in the combinatorial possibilities of verbs and aspect in Urdu: the perfective form of the -ya: kar construction (e.g. ro-ya: ki: cry-Pfv do.Pfv) is sharply ungrammatical in modern Urdu and Hindi, despite being freely attested in 19th century literature. We investigate this diachronic shift through historical text analysis, a large-scale corpus study which confirms the stark absence of perfective forms and subjective evaluation tasks with native speakers, who judge perfective examples as highly unnatural. We argue that this gap arose from a fundamental morphosyntactic conflict: the construction's requirement for a nominative subject and an invariant participle clashes with the core grammatical rule that transitive perfective assign ergative case. This conflict rendered the perfective form unstable, and its functional replacement by other constructions allowed the gap to become entrenched in the modern grammar.