Optional ergative case marking in non-perfective aspect in Nepali

Abstract

This thesis examines the phenomenon of optional ergative case marking (OEM) in the imperfective aspect in Nepali. Nepali exhibits a consistent ergative alignment in the perfective aspect, where subjects of transitive verbs and some unergative verbs are obligatorily assigned ergative case. In the imperfective aspect, however, the use of ergative case marker ( -le ) is optional for animate agents-- inanimate agents are obligatorily marked with the ergative marker in all aspects. Various hypotheses have been proposed in the past to account for the variable ergative pattern in Nepali. However, there is still a lack of consensus in the literature on how and why animate agents are assigned ergative marker in the imperfective aspect. Past studies have mostly relied on isolated constructions (elicited or scripted), a plausible factor behind the lack of a conclusive account for the phenomenon. The current research examines various accounts that have been hypothesised in the literature and test them with mostly naturalistic data obtained from five TV talk shows. Where there were no possibilities to use naturalistic data, utterances with well-defined pragmatic contexts were constructed. This thesis argues that combinations of multiple factors including information structure content -- in particular focus and contrastiveness -- and semantic factors -- in particular argument agentivity and verb semantics-- condition the optional ergative marking pattern in Nepali.