TENSE AND ASPECT IN INDO-ARYAN LANGUAGES: VARIATION AND DIACHRONY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ashwini Deo September 2006 c Copyright by Ashwini Deo 2007 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Paul Kiparsky Principal Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Cleo Condoravdi I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Beth Levin I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Peter Sells Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies. iii iv Acknowledgements There are several people involved in the writing of this dissertation who must have collec- tively contributed more to it than I did and I am grateful for their generosity in letting me be the sole author of this work for whatever it is worth. During the writing of this dissertation and more generally, I have been lucky to have a committee that was an incredible source of ideas, constructive comments, and criticism. Paul Kiparsky has been the best mentor and guide that I could have had. I have learned from Paul about the intricacies of Paninian grammar, the beauty and elegance of metrical verse and its generative analysis, morphology, the importance of doing “amphichronic lin- guistics”, and much more. This project was directly inspired by his conception of the role of historical linguistics in linguistic theory, and Paul’s encouragement and engagement have been instrumental to its development. I can safely say that Cleo Condoravdi has taught me all the tense/aspect semantics that I know (or think I know). When my historical data showed me that I needed a semantic analysis and that one wasn’t readily available, Cleo came to my help and patiently helped me sort through both the semantics literature and my empirical data. She has treated my ideas with just the right amount of respect and im- patience and been extremely generous with her ideas to get the analysis to come to where it stands now. Beth Levin taught me lexical semantics and how to appreciate the differences between shades of meaning too subtle for me to grasp. Several times, she has countered the gross classifications and categorizations I came up with and forced me to look for more nuanced explanatory generalizations. I am grateful to her for her careful commenting on several drafts and her insistence on clarity of presentation and content. Peter Sells is a great person to try out analyses on and to work out what the properties of a desirable analysis should be. Meetings with him have always led to a much more clear-headed idea of where I wanted to go with my projects. Beyond my committee, I thank David Beaver, Ivan Sag, and Elizabeth Traugott for v several discussions and comments as this work developed. The Stanford Linguistics De- partment has been a very congenial and intellectually stimulating environment to work and grow in and I am fortunate to have had a chance to spend several years here. I also thank Joan Bresnan and Arnold Zwicky, who contributed a lot to my intellectual development in my first few years here. I am also grateful to Dr. S.D. Joshi who taught me through Panini how linguistics should really be done. For companionship and interesting discussions I thank Luc Baronian, Luis Casillas, John Beavers, Brady Clark, Cathryn Donhue, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Dmitry Levinson, Mary Rose, Devyani Sharma, Judith Tonhauser, and Shiao Wei Tham. I am grateful to Veronica Gerassimova and Itamar Francez for their friendship, which has made graduate school much more meaningful. Itamar I particularly thank for making the task of filing long-distance easier and for constantly leaving his Yahoo Chat window open, a practice that has done wonders for our linguistic growth, among other things. This dissertation was supposed to be about morphosyntactic variation in Indo-Aryan. Somewhere along the way, it changed its mind and decided to take the semantics route. A key factor in this turn was Judith Tonhauser, who in a conversation during a Friday Social, convinced me to switch, and got me to ‘discover’ formal semantics. I am glad she did. My informants and friends, scattered over several villages in Northern Maharashtra, are directly responsible for one of the main empirical claim made in this dissertation — the loss of the past-present distinction in Middle Indo-Aryan. Their patience and their interest in my work has been crucial to developing the empirical basis of this work. I would especially like to thank Chamulal Rathwa and Alka Padwi (Dehawali Bhili), Gulabsingh Pawra, Bhaisingh Pawra, and Barfi Pawra (Pawri), Suresh Bacchav, Gayatri Bacchav, and Krishna Mohan (Ahirani), and Bhaskar Gangurde (Konkana) for sharing their language, culture, and life with me and their careful efforts to teach me aspects of their languages. The Linguistics department at Konstanz has been like a long-distance linguistic family. Miriam Butt has been constantly encouraging, ever since I first came to Stanford. She has been critical to building both my confidence and my skills as a linguist and has seen the insights I was struggling to express through the murk of incoherent writing. Her comments, both as a South-Asianist and as a theoretical linguist, have contributed significantly to this and other work. I am grateful to Miriam and to Aditi Lahiri for inviting me several times to Konstanz for workshops and research projects. vi I am grateful to the American Institute of Indian Studies for a Junior Research Fel- lowship to do fieldwork in India during 2003-2004 and to the National Science Foundation for a Dissertation Improvement Grant between 2003-2005 (BCS 0318478) for field support. The write-up of this dissertation was greatly facilitated by the Geballe dissertation writing fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center for 2005-2006. Ashish Chadha convinced me to make the move from India to the United States to pursue a Linguistics Ph.D way back in 1999. Among other things, I have to thank him for lengthy arguments over breakfast that stretched beyond lunch, the best sambar and maa ki dal in the world, the constant supply of international cinema and in-home LCD projector arrangements, and for never failing to remind me that, in the larger scheme of things, everything one does is pointless, but nevertheless one has to continue doing it wholeheartedly. Ashish is the only karmayogi I know from close and it has been a privilege learning from him. Iravati, I have to thank for several joys and discoveries. I discovered through her that a three month old, placed in the right position, is capable of ripping out keys from a G4 laptop, that an underspecified coronal feature might be acquired before manner features are acquired, the “Primacy of Aspect” hypothesis, and that a baby is an extremely useful prop to have around during fieldwork sessions. I also thank my parents- in-law, Lalit and Urmil Chadha for being great supports and for being much more proud of me than I deserve. I thank Aditi for being there at all times, and Pawan, Meghana, Maya, and Reviel for their friendship. To my parents, Chhaya and Sharad Deo, I owe more than I can express. In addition to doing all the wonderful things that only parents can do, they typed out the text of the Old Marathi text Dny¯ane´swari in electronic form for me so that I could run searches through it and cheerfully took care of their granddaughter for several months while their daughter was struggling to write her dissertation. I would like to thank my mother for helping me search through Old and Middle Marathi texts for data that I wanted and for spending six months in the US taking care her granddaughter. This dissertation is dedicated to both of them. vii Abbreviations 1 = First Person 2 = Second Person 3 = Third person abl = Ablative Case acc = Accusative Case aor = OIA Aorist dat = Dative Case caus = Causative Morpheme erg = Ergative Case emph = Emphatic clitic f = Feminine Gender fut = Future Tense gen = Genitive Case ger = Gerund impf = OIA Present paradigm (and cognates) impf = Imperfective Aspect (for crosslinguistic data) impf = OIA Imperfective Participle (and cognates) viii impfct = OIA Imperfect imp = Imperative Mood inf = Infinitival ins = Instrumental Case loc = Locative Case MIA = Middle Indo Aryan m = Masculine Gender NIA = New Indo Aryan n = Neuter Gender nom = Nominative Case neg = Negative Particle/ Inflection OIA = Old Indo Aryan pass = Passive Voice perf = OIA resultative stative participle (and cognates) pst = Past Tense pfct = OIA Perfect pl = Plural pres = Present Tense prog = Progressive aspect quot = Quotative Marker sg = Singular voc = Vocative Case ix Contents Acknowledgements v Abbreviations viii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Goals ....................................... 1 1.2 Unifying semantic and grammaticalization approaches . ........... 3 1.2.1 Describing aspectual categories . .... 5 1.2.2 Markedness, privative opposition, and blocking . ........ 10 1.3 Theoreticalproposal .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 12 1.4 Linguisticscope................................. 14 1.4.1 Loss of tense distinctions in Indo-Aryan . ..... 14 1.4.2 Thediachronicdata ........................... 15 1.4.3 Thesynchronicdata ..........................