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Project

The variability of ergativity in the Indo-Aryan languages of the South-Asian sub¬continent. A typological study of the ergative patterning of Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Nepali, Marathi, Marwari, Sindhi, Punjabi and Gujarati.
Code
3F019207
Duration
01 October 2007 → 30 September 2011
Funding
Regional and community funding: Special Research Fund, Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Language studies
    • Linguistics
    • Literary studies
    • Theory and methodology of linguistics
    • Other languages and literary studies
Keywords
ergativity linguistic typology syntax Indo-Aryan
 
Project description

This typological study of various Indo-Aryan languages comprises two objectives: i) to elucidate, by means of a synchronic comparison, the diachronic problem of the disappearance or degeneration of the ergative construction in split ergative languages ii) to offer an empirical grounding for a better understanding of the phenomenon of ergativity and to offer an attempt to a general definition of it.