A fresh look at grammatical relations in Indo-Aryan

Verb agreement in Hindi has recently been shown to be sensitive to both argument structure and morphological case features (Mohanan, 1994): the verb agrees with the ‘highest nominative’ argument, i.e., with a nominative S- or A-argument, or if there is no nominative A, with a nominative O-argument (where S = ‘single argument of intransitives’, A = ‘transitive actor’, O = ‘transitive object’). In this article we propose that such a combination of morphological and syntactico-semantic notions is a general characteristic of the over-all syntax of many if not all Indo-Aryan languages. On the basis of constructions which are demonstrably sensitive to grammatical relations, viz. verb agreement, gapping in nonfinite clauses, control constructions and matrix-coding (‘raising’), we argue that these relations are defined as ‘nominative or ergative S/A’ in Maithili and Nepali. Hindi shows a split between some constructions being sensitive to the same grammatical relation and others to a notion of ‘non-genitive S/A’ (gapping in converb clauses) and to ‘highest nominative’ (agreement). Other constructions, viz. conjunction reduction, converbial reference control, and reflexivization, prove not to be sensitive to grammatical relations, in contradiction to frequent assumptions made in the literature on Indo-Aryan syntax.