Syntax

MID TERM ASSIGNMENT

NAME ; RIZWANA MUNIR

PROGRAMME;

M.PHIL APPLIED LINGUISTICS (3RD Semester)

UNIVERSITY OF LAHORE

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC;

Case system in Urdu

SUBMITTED TO ;

Sir Azhar Munir

TOPIC;
Case system in Urdu

What is case system?

The term case is from Latin c¯asus, which is in turn a translation of the
Greek pt¯osis ‘fall’. The term originally referred to verbs as well as
nouns and the idea seems to have been of falling away from an
assumed standard form . . . [Blake 2001:18]

Case is a grammatical category determined by the syntactic or

semantic function of a noun or pronoun. ... The term case has
traditionally been restricted to apply to only those languages which
indicate certain functions by the inflection of If a language has a
number of grammatical cases that denote a variety of roles, that
language is said to have a case system.

Most cases indicate roles like the subject of a sentence (nominative),

the direct object of a verb (accusative), and the indirect object of a verb
(dative), among many others.Case systems are relatively common
globally, but vary from the extremely simple to the extremely
complex.: nouns. pronouns.

Languages such as Ancient Greek, Armenian, Assamese, most Balto-

Slavic languages, Basque, most Caucasian languages, German,
Icelandic, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Sanskrit, Tamil, Tibetan (one of a
few tonal languages), the Turkic languages and the Uralic languages
have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and
determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to
indicate their case.

The number of cases differs between languages: Esperanto has two;

modern English has three but for pronouns only; German and Icelandic
have four; Romanian has five; Latin, Russian and Turkish each have at
least six; Armenian, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbian,
Croatian, Slovak and Ukrainian have seven; Sanskrit and Tamil have
eight; Estonian has 14; Finnish has 15; Hungarian has 18 and Tsez has
64 cases.

Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative

and genitive. A role that one of those languages marks by case is often
marked in English with a preposition. For example, the English
prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with
his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the
instrumental case or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning
"the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς
(poús) "foot") changing to dative form.

The analyses the complex Case system of Urdu within the framework
of Government and Binding (GB) theory. It concentrates both on the
word order and the phrase structure order of the language and on the
various Cases to subject NPs in Urdu.

The Urdu language started evolving from Farsi and Arabic contacts
during the invasions of the Indian subcontinent by Persian and Turkic
forces from the 11th century onward. Urdu developed more decisively
during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and the Mughal Empire
(1526–1858).

The flexible word order of Urdu has been explained in terms of

typological features and frequency count methods. The GB theory
assumes Verb-raising rule to be part of the Universal Grammar.
However, in Urdu, such a rule will produce an incorrect surface word
order due to the assumed order of the phrase structures.It demonstates
that an alternative analysis, viz. INFL-lowering, not only allows the
correct word order but also explains the verb-agreement facts in Urdu.

Languages are dynamic in nature and Urdu language is no exception.

Semantic change in Urdu lexis and focuses on the meaning of the word
“mashkoor” (thanked). The present study strengthens the idea that
Urdu language has changed with the passage of time.It also proposes
that Urdu dictionaries should be corpus based and include the current
usage by the masses to incorporate the latest changes.

Living languages have a tendency to change over time. This change

may be explained in phonetic, syntactic and semantic terms. New
words, novel meanings, different pronunciations, deviant grammatical
forms are continuously coming into use replacing the older ones.
(Trask, 1994).Like other aspects of language, the meanings of words
also change constantly. The scholars are interested in change in the
meanings of linguistic expressions and the spread of specific forms
into new meanings. The meanings of words with the passage of time
may become more positive or negative, may become broader or
narrower, turn more specialized or generalized and may also employ
metaphor or different kinds of metonymy.The meanings of different
words in a language may perhaps be caused by the factors inside or
outside the language (Campbell, 2004).

These factors cause different types of change in words’ meanings.

Many researchers have proposed different mechanisms or ways of
classifying these changes. As Geeraerts (2009) distinguishes between
semasiological and onomasiological mechanisms. Semasiological
mechanism provides existing words with new meaning and
onomasiological involves changes through which a concept comes to
be expressed by a new item. The new meaning of words can replace or
coexist with the older one. Traugott and Dasher (2002) state that the
old meanings of the words do not need to disappear. New meanings
can coexist with the older ones.

Case Markers;
Case markers are defined as the relational morphemes or the lexical
units or words,which mark the grammatical functions to the words
with which they are used. In Urdu, the case markers are syntactically
attached with the words but are lexically independent.It means they are
treated with independent POS tags (Rizvi et al., 2005). They affect the
structure of the sentence and can cause grammatical ambiguities, like;
the free word order property of Urdu text is due to case markers.

For example, both the phrases; “ ‫رنگوں کے‬

‫( ” نام‬rangoon kay naam, colors’ names) and “ ‫( ” نام رنگوں کے‬naam

rangoon kay, colors’ names) are correct and have same meaning, but
different word order due to the use of the case marker “ ‫( ” کے‬kay).
Some more examples of the use of case markers are “ ‫ایران کا‬

‫( ” بادشاه‬Iran ka badshah, king of Persia), and “ ‫(” شیشے کی بوتل‬sheeshay

ki bottle, glass bottle).

We consulted dictionaries (Ferozul-lughaat Farsi part 2, kaomi

Angrezi- Urdu Lughat, Ferozul-lughaat Urdu,Farhang-e-Aasfia part 4,
Noor-ul-lughaat part 3) to get the meanings of the word “mashkoor”
(thanked) as dictionaries are considered to be the ultimate authority for
determining the accurate pronunciation and meanings of the words
(Fromkin, Rodman & Hyans, 2010).

In general, the grammarians, lexicographers and the teachers are

believed to have the authority to decide the correct structures, forms
and meanings of words in a language. But the findings of our research
do not confirm these assumptions. Pakistani Urdu users including the
students, general teachers and the Urdu teachers argue that it is not the
grammarians, lexicographers or the teachers who decides correct forms
in a language but the users of a language have this authority. They can
use any new or alternative lexical item or form in a language and it will
be acceptable as part of a language because each language survives on
the basis of its usage.

Rule based modeling of the grammar of a language is important for

various natural language processing chores. Formulation of Urdu case
marking system based on Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is
presented. Semantic information associated with nouns is incorporated
to better classify grammatical roles adopted by each case. Especially,
the versatile case marker ‘sey’ has found to adopt different roles
depending upon semantic information associated with nouns. The
agent role of ‘sey’ found by such classification helped identifying
subject and indirect subject roles of tetravalent causative verbs found
in Urdu language.

LFG is a formalism that models variations across various language

structures by separating surface phrase structure (called c-structure)
from the underlying grammatical functional structure (called
fstructure).Here we give lexical functional equations for each case that
are used to generate parse tree and attributevalue matrices. In
particular, we formulated case marked with ‘sey’ by involving
semantic information of nouns involved to achieve better resolution of
role adopted by this case marker. The agent case thus formulated,
which is linked with animated nouns is shown to act as indirect subject
in tetravalent causative verbs of Urdu, in addition to subject marked
with ergative case. Other two objects appear in dative and nominative
cases respectively.

The following are case markers in Urdu.The nominative, ergative,

dative and accusative case has been discussed extensively . I briefly
present these with some difference of opinion in ergative and
accusative cases.

A. Nominative Case;
If there is no case marker with the noun (or the noun phrase), the noun
is said to be in nominative case, which is the default case of noun, Here
both ‘boy’ and ‘book’ are in nominative form, which assume subject
and object functions respectively.
The Nominal Domain;
• No definite determiners (demonstratives, one indefinite determiner).
Specificity marked via

the accusative case clitic ko, as in Turkish (Enc¸ 1991).

• Adjectives agree in number and gender with the noun. Mostly

preverbal.

• Quantifiers are prenominal, but can sometimes appear postnominally.

Anybody, nobody,somebody, etc. are realized compositionally.

• There are non-nominative subjects (see Mohanan 1994 for subject

tests).

• Correlatives (Dayal, Bhatt).

B. Ergative Case
The ergative is confined to subjects and must appear on transitive

verbs in the perfect.Marked with case marker, ney, expresses actor/

agent/subject in perfective tenses for transitive verbs.

C. Dative Case
The dative is identical in form to the accusative. It differs from the
accusative in that it marks indirect objects, and subjects, and never
alternates with nominative objects.The dative indirect object never
becomes subject under passivization, unlike the accusative.

Marked with case marker, kao, expresses indirect object/recipient/

beneficiary/ receiver for ditransitive verbs.For the argument structure
of some verbs that do not take ergative or nominative subjects, dative
case is used.

D. Accusative Case
The accusative is form-identical with the dative ko. Many approaches
therefore assume that Urdu/Hindi lacks an accusative and that the ko is
an inherent dative case (e.g., Mahajan 1990,Davison 1998). However,
there are two distinct distributional patterns with regard to ko.
Furthermore, ko is associated with a notion of affectedness (Saksena
1982).

Marked with case marker, kao, expresses direct object/ undergoer/

patient usually for transitive verbs. This object typically becomes
subject under passivisation. This marker is phonetically same case
marker used to mark dative case.But it marks a different grammatical
function and therefore is a separate case.

E. Case Marked with ‘sey’

The noun (or noun phrases) marked with case marker, sey are
characterized as an instrumental case in most of the literature on Urdu
and Hindi. Actually, the ‘sey’ is too versatile and noun cases marked
with ‘sey’ occupy different grammatical relations. They are sometimes
subject, object, oblique arguments controlled by verb argument
structure and also as adjunct in a post-positional phrase or as an
adverbial phrase.

F. Agent Case

The animate noun (or noun phrase) marked with case marker, sey, is
categorized as agent case and occupies ‘subject’ position in the verb’s
argument structure.

G. Mutual Case

The case marker ‘sey’ is also used to mark animate nouns as ‘object’
position in the verbal argument structure. Here the marked noun is
undergoer or experiencer of the action involved and thus occupies
object position.

H. Instrumental Case

The instrumental se is extremely versatile. It may be used for

instrumental adjuncts, for source expressions, both locativeand
material as well as for comitatives and for causes.

For the inanimate nouns (or noun phrases) known as the instrumental
nouns in Urdu: aesm-e-aalah, when marked with case marker, sey, are
categorized as instrumental case.For instrumental case the nouns are
inanimate, classified as instrumental nouns and typically used by some
agent or actor as an aid to accomplish some task.
In Urdu-Hindi, morphological formation of causatives exists for many
verbs. There are two causative forms in Urdu-Hindi. We refer to them
by numbers 1 and 2. Causative form 1, is formed by adding suffix -aa
to the stem form of the verb. It requires that the causee is in accusative
case marked with case marker ‘kao’. Causative form 2 is formed by
using suffix -waa to the verb’s stem form. The causee is required in
agent case marked with case marker ‘sey’.

Urdu is a South Asian language spoken in:

• Pakistan (national language)

• India (one of the 18 official languages)

• World-Wide due to South Asian Diaspora (big populations in U.K.,

U.S.A., Canada, etc.)

Urdu is closely related to Hindi.

Clause Structure

• SOV, fairly free word order.

• Everything head-final, except for some complementizers (cf. Bayer

1999), relative clauses.

• Word order determined by information structure (Butt and King 1996,

1997).

• Rampant Pro-drop. Also determined by information structure. (Butt

and King 1997, Prasad 2003).

• No definite determiners (demonstratives, one indefinite determiner).

Specificity marked via the accusative case clitic ko, as in Turkish (Enc¸
1991).

• Adjectives agree in number and gender with the noun. Mostly

preverbal.

• Quantifiers are prenominal, but can sometimes appear postnominally.

Anybody, nobody,somebody, etc. are realized compositionally.

• There are non-nominative subjects (see Mohanan 1994 for subject

tests).
• Correlatives (Dayal, Bhatt).

We can analyse Urdu as split-ergative language. The analysis was

based on standard check-list of three fundamental parameters i.e. case
markers, verb agreement and constituent order. We found out that a
split pattern in Urdu is triggered by ergative case marking. The ergative
case marker is requirement of perfective tense which does not allow
nominative case marking to occur on subjects. Other than that
nominative-accusative format is observed.We also found that with
ergative case markers the verb starts agreeing with object of
transitive/intransitive clauses which otherwise agree with subject again
showing a split behavior. Much work has been done on non-
nominative subjects in Urdu but in this analysis explicit attempt to
prove Urdu a split-ergative language.

We can conclude from the whole discussion that Unlike English,Urdu

is an Indo-Aryan language, and is a free phrase-order language,i.e. the
phrase within a sentence have free order and however, the words
within a phrase have a fixed order.In Urdu unlike English a noun
phrase is not necessarily built around a single noun but it can be
comprised of other phrases as well.Also in urdu languages a variety of
verb phrases are present including conjunct and compound verb
phrases and it contains a verb followed by one or more auxiliaries
(AUX) and verb tense markers (VBT). The major difference lies in
English and urdu on phrase level is the common use of Genitive phrase
in Udu which is no longer used in Modern English.Similarly Urdu has
a postpositional phrase instead of English prepositional phrase ,which
differs in the way that it precedes objects.
References ;
Butt, Miriam. 1995. The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu.
Stanford, California: CSLI Publications.

Butt, Miriam and Tracy H. King. 1996. Structural Topic and Focus
withoutMovement. In On-line Proceedings of the First LFG
Conference, Rank Xerox, Grenoble.

 Bashir, Elena. 1999. The Urdu and Hindi Ergative Postposition ne:
Its Changing Role in the Grammar. In The Yearbook of South Asian
Languages and Linguistics, ed. Rajendra Singh.11–36. New Delhi:
Sage Publications.

 Beg, Mirza Khalil A. 1988. Urdu Grammar: History and Structure.

New Delhi: Bahri Publications.

 Butt, Miriam. 1993. Object Specificity and Agreement in

Hindi/Urdu. In Papers from the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicgo
Linguistic Society, 80–103.

 M. Dalrymple, Lexical Functional Grammar, in Encyclopedia of

Cognitive Science, L. Nadel, Editor. 2002, Nature Publishing Group,
Macmillan.