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The Syntax of Participal Forms in Hindi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

J. Burton-Page
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Extract

This study is concerned with the interpretation of number and gender concord as abstracted from sentences of different types whose common feature is the inclusion of a participial form. This term is used here, rather than the more usual ‘participle’, as the forms being considered here do not exactly correspond with what are described in the traditional grammars as ‘present (or imperfect) participle’ and ‘past (or imperfect) participle’; the term is applied here to those members of a verbal paradigm which can be colligated with huaa, huii, or hue.

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Articles
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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , February 1957 , pp. 94 - 104
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1957

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References

page 94 note 1 Hindi examples are quoted in roman letters in bold type. This romanization represents a transliteration of the Nāgarī character rather than a transcription, and hence departs from Firth's transcriptions used in e.g. Harley's Colloquial Hindustani and T. Grahame Bailey's Teach yourself Hindustani; these aimed at providing a transcription of Hindustani with particular reference to the Perso-Arabic script, and have proved impracticable for the teaching of Hindi where literacy in the Nāgarī script must be an aim. The present transliteration is orthographically more accurate, yet is no less adequate phonologically, and is that used in my Hindi language course, now in preparation.

The principal differences from Firth's transcription are: vowels ә aa, i ii, U UU (rather than әa,yi,Wu);eεoɔ (rather than eəyOəW). Thus appears as rather than Sεyyyyd! In the consonants, η and are introduced for and respectively. Nasality is represented by over the vowel-letter, the homorganic nasal by (or by the class nasal signs , in ligatures, not used here). Conjunct characters of the Nāgarī script are represented by ligatures: e-g. and are distinguished as kərtaa and . The ‘inherent vowel’ is not accorded a roman symbol unless it is usually realized in speech: thus can be transliterated, according to context, as nə or n; but that it is transliterated n does not preclude the occasional realization of it as n) in that context.

This system was introduced in my own teaching after Seminar discussion in the Department of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon in 1952–3; a fuller account will appear in my book The Hindi language, also in preparation.

page 94 note 2 Junction-forms of V with these terminations, and the so-called ‘irregular past participles’ (kərnaa: kiyaa, kii, kie; lenaa: liyaa, lii, lie; denaa: diyaa, dii, die, etc.) are disregarded for the purpose of this symbolization. The usual form in use for dictionary entries of verbs would thus be Vnaa.

It must be mentioned that the ‘past participle’ does not represent such a junction from the historical point of view, since not all forms of the verb relate to one form of the verbal base in a previous period of linguistic history; in many cases, for example, the Hindi ‘past participle’ reflects the OIA past participle passive, whereas the base of the Hindi imperfective forms reflects the base of the OIA present tense. For an account of Hindi diyaa and liyaa, cf. Tedesco, P., ‘Geben und Nehmen im Indischen’, JAOS, XLIII, 1923, 358–90.Google Scholar

page 95 note 1 For ‘place’ in the Hindi sentence, see final paragraph of this page.

page 95 note 2 This topic has recently been treated fully by Allen, W.S., ‘A study in the analysis of Hindi sentence-structure’, Ada Linguistica, vi, 2–3, 1950–1951Google Scholar, 68–86, with the findings of which I am in complete agreement, and which are taken aa the starting-point of much of this discussion; should be noticed, however, that his treatment relates to modern standard Western Hindi (), and is not to be taken as extending to either medieval Hindi or to the Hindi dialects. A similar restriction is applied to the present study.

page 95 note 3 This may at first sight appear to be a circular statement. It is in fact not so, since the structures considered here are more extensive than those by which the categories of transitivity are established; i.e. transitivity, having been established with reference to one context, may be applied to another context. Here transitivity may be relevant to V 1 as well as to V 2 (cf. below, n. 5).

page 95 note 4 As a matter of purely practical convenience it may be said that all Hindi verbs whose English translation-equivalents are usually considered as transitive fall within the transitive category in Hindi, with the exception of compound verbs one of whose components is intransitive (e.g., lenaa ‘to take’ is transitive; le aanaa ‘to bring’ is not), and also of the verbs bolnaa ‘to speak’, Səməjhnaa ‘to understand’, laanaa ‘to bring’, bhuulnaa ‘to forget’, and a few others of less common occurrence.

page 95 note 5 cf. Allen, op. cit., 73. V has been used here, to indicate any possible verbal form, rather than Allen's V, since V has already been used for the verbal base, cf. n. 2, p. 94. It will later be necessary to distinguish the verbal bases of the participial forms as V l, those of the finite verbal forms as V 2.

page 96 note 1 English translations are given here merely for convenience: they have no relevance to the analyses.

page 96 note 2 cf. Allen, op. cit., 80.

page 97 note 1 English translations are given here merely for convenience: they have no relevance to the analyses.

page 97 note 2 cf. Allen, op. cit., 80.

page 98 note 1 This generalization is not to be taken as applicable in all cases; instances can occur N 1|N 2|V- where V is intransitive. Thus, in the case of laanaa—e.g., Vəh | ekkursii | laayaa ‘he brought a chair’—the intransitive verb ‘takes an object’; transitivity, however, is not be defined in notional terms, but by syntactical criteria, cf. p. 95.

page 98 note 2 ‘Adjective’ is not a formal category. Within the category of nominals the formal subcategories of noun and pronoun can be established; ‘adjective’ is a syntactical category which can be set up with reference to either sub-category.

page 99 note 1 cf. Allen, op. oit., 73–4.

page 99 note 2 Kellogg, S.H., A grammar of the Hindi language. Thirdedition, London, 1938, § 754, (1)Google Scholara. This example is from early nineteenth-century Hindi (Premsāgar ? No reference is given); modern idiom requires daan denaa rather than daan kərnaa, and daan dii huii gaae would be acceptable modern Hindi.

page 99 note 3 This in fact provides a useful criterion for considering such constructs (Platts, Hindustani grammar, § 205, refers to them as ‘Nominal Compound Verbs’; Harley, Colloquial Hindustani, 63, as ‘Conjuncts of Verb and Noun’; T. Grahame Bailey, Teach yourself Hindustani, 79 ff., as ‘Conjunct Verbs’) as verbs, rather than as ‘verb with a noun as its object’, as Platts. Since the term ‘Compound Verbs‘is usually applied to constructs of a different class, Bailey's term seems as convenient as any. It would, however, be better restricted to his ‘A’ construction.

page 100 note 1 cf. Platts, op. cit., § 422a. ‘…the object usually occurs in the dative form of the accusative, and hence the concord between it and the participle is disturbed’. We have every sympathy with the unfortunate concord in such a predicament !

page 100 note 2 cf. Allen, op. cit., p. 80, n. 1.

page 101 note 1 cf. Allen, op. cit., 80.

page 101 note 2 cf. Allen, op. cit., 81 (quoting Sapir).

page 101 note 3 cf. Allen, loc. cit., discussing the indications of the sentence as a whole.

page 101 note 4 Jules Bloch, L'indo-arytn, 261.

page 102 note 1 Bloch, op. cit., 265.

page 102 note 2 cf. Robins, B.H., ‘Noun and verb in universal grammar’, Language, XXVIII, 3, 1952,. 296–7.Google Scholar

page 102 note 3 For such an approach, see my Hindi language course, Chapters 23 and 24.

page 102 note 4 cf. Robins, loc. cit.