A Paradigm Gap in Urdu

2025-08-31

AI Summary

This study identifies a systematic paradigm gap in the aspectual system of modern Urdu: the formerly productive perfective construction *V-ya: kar* (e.g., *ro-ya: ki* ‘has cried’) has become highly unnatural or grammatically unacceptable in contemporary usage. Employing diachronic text analysis, large-scale corpus statistics, and native-speaker grammaticality judgment experiments, the research confirms the construction’s cross-regional obsolescence. Its central contribution is the Morphosyntactic Conflict Hypothesis: *V-ya: kar* requires a nominative subject and an invariant past participle, yet transitive perfectives in Urdu obligatorily trigger ergative case assignment, generating a syntactico-morphological mismatch that drives diachronic erosion. The study thus establishes both the systematicity of this paradigm gap and its grammatical motivation, offering a theoretically grounded, interface-based account of aspectual change in South Asian languages.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Imperfect Information
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Argumentation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Studies of user behavior, including longitudinal effects of personalized systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

In this paper, we document a paradigm gap in the combinatorial possibilities of verbs and aspect in Urdu: the perfective form of the -ya: kar construction (e.g. ro-ya: ki: cry-Pfv do.Pfv) is sharply ungrammatical in modern Urdu and Hindi, despite being freely attested in 19th century literature. We investigate this diachronic shift through historical text analysis, a large-scale corpus study which confirms the stark absence of perfective forms and subjective evaluation tasks with native speakers, who judge perfective examples as highly unnatural. We argue that this gap arose from a fundamental morphosyntactic conflict: the construction's requirement for a nominative subject and an invariant participle clashes with the core grammatical rule that transitive perfective assign ergative case. This conflict rendered the perfective form unstable, and its functional replacement by other constructions allowed the gap to become entrenched in the modern grammar.

Problem

• Investigates ungrammatical perfective form in Urdu verbs
• Examines diachronic shift through historical text analysis
• Identifies morphosyntactic conflict causing paradigm gap

Innovation

• Historical text analysis for diachronic shift
• Large-scale corpus study confirming absence
• Subjective evaluation tasks with native speakers