Revisiting Morphological Ergativity in Hindi-Urdu

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to understand Hindi-Urdu morphological ergativity from a new perspective. We critically assess the existing ergativity analyses for Hindi-Urdu, with the main focus on light verb constructions. Our main contentions are: (i) transitivity of the lexical verb or that of the light verb does not determine ergative case marking on the subject and (ii) ergative subject constructions do not have underlying control representations. Our account gives a phase-based derivational approach to ergative as an inherent case.