Ergativity in Khorthɑ: An Enigmatic Phenomenon

Abstract

Khortha (a variety of Angika) is spoken in the western part of Jharkhand and Bihar. The languages that are spoken in the neighboring areas where Khortha is spoken are Bangla, Magahi, Maithili and Santhali. Hindi functions as the lingua franca in the area and is mainly used by the literate people. The languages (except Hindi) that are used as ‘contact‐languages’ in the area do not have any trace of ‘ergativity.’ The ‘grammatical gender’ is also not present in Khortha nor is the linguistic feature of any language that is spoken in the area. Hindi is again an exception to this. Khortha also does not show any syntactic environment where the ‘object‐verb agreement’ can be mediated as a separate system of agreement as is the case in Hindi. The linguistic features such as availability of ‘grammatical gender’ and marking ‘object‐verb agreement’ as an independent system of agreement are some of the core factors (i.e. in some cases all of these factors or one of these factors) for marking the ‘split‐ergativity’ in most of the Indian languages. The languages like Hmar, Mizo, Halam etc. from Tibeto‐Burman family are such where the ‘ergativity’ is marked in a full scale as defined by Dixon(1994: 1). Khortha displays ‘ergative case’ with the subject NPs either by a phonological material i.e. nasalization of the vowel of the word or by the placement of ‘‐e’ if the subject NP ends in a consonant sound. This ergative case in Khortha appears in the sentence only when the verb in the sentence is transitive and not when the verb is intransitive, meaning as per Dixon’s definition of ‘ergativity’. Moreover, Khortha goes beyond the system of ‘split‐ergative marking’ as is the case in most of the Indo‐Aryan languages and it seems to have the marking of ergativity as a fully‐ergative language. Thus, Khortha comes very close to Hmar, Mizo and Halam from Tibeto‐Burman family of languages in India and Basque, Dyirbal and Eskimo in the world with regard to the marking of ergativity. Khortha also behaves very different with regard to the system of agreement if we compare it with Hindi and some other Indo‐Aryan languages that have ‘split‐ ergativity.’The present paper treats ergativity and agreement as two different linguistic constructs and thus it demonstrates as to how agreement is erroneously equated with ergativity. Dixon(1979: 94) or Comrie(1978) or anyone who characterized the notion of ‘ergativity’ never claimed that ergative and agreement should be treated as ‘ part and parcel’ as it has been misconceived by some scholars working on Indo‐Aryan languages. The ergative case marker in Khortha is phonologically realized or marked on the subject NP by suffixing ‘ẽ’ as soon as the verb changes from an intransitive to transitive. This is why Khortha will be compared in the paper with Hmar and Basque to make the point clear. The appearance of the ‘ergative’ case with the subject NP is conditioned with the ± transitivity of the verb in the language. This shows a contrast when we compare the structure of Khortha with ‘Punjabi, ‘kangri’ and other Indo‐Aryan languages that allow marking for ergative either covert or overt with the subject NP in some conditioned syntactic environments such as ‘past simple tense, perfective aspect, only with subject in third person etc. The paper is titled as ergativity in Khortha as ‘enigmatic phenomenon’ because I have no answer to the question, ‘from where did this ergativity come to Khortha which is surrounded with languages with no ‘ergative‐case’? The question is a full‐fledged topic for a good piece of research work in diachronic linguistics and the present paper can function as a path‐guider for the future research work.