Abdul Haq was the secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu from 1912 to 1961. He was also a founder of Osmania University, one of the first universities in India to provide instruction in an Indian vernacular. He had a lifelong devotion towards improving the status of Urdu and of the Indian Muslim community at large. He was the figure most involved with the standardization of Urdu and establishment of this language as a symbol of Muslim identity. Through an analysis of Abdul Haq’s involvement in language reform movements and the politics of the early 20th century, especially considering the fallout after the 1936 meeting of the Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad, I seek to show the nature of language as a nationalist tool. I argue that language is not inherently associated with the nation-building process, but that it must first be standardized into a form which can be used as a political tool and a point of identification for the community rallied behind it. / text

This dissertation explores the interaction of syntax and morphology in the morpholog- ical realization of AGREE-relations. I present two case studies of derivational interactions of AGREE-processes where the morphological realization of the later processes are affected by the earlier ones. The two cases studied differ in the way probes and goals interact. The first part of the dissertation explores restrictions on clitic combinations where two goals vie for the features of one probe. The second part discusses the reverse situation, where two probes are agreeing with the same goal. The first configuration arises in restrictions on clitic combinations where v can AGREE with an indirect object and a direct object one at a time (Anagnostopoulou 2003, 2005b, Béjar and Rezác 2003). These configurations give rise to a form of competition: the sec- ond argument will fail to AGREE in any features that it shares with the first. I show that this form of competition extends from restrictions involving local person arguments, where it has been used so far, to restrictions involving third person and plural, which have so far been treated as morphological. Whereas the restrictions on local person lead to ungrammaticality, those on third person and plural result in impoverished morphological realization. I argue that this difference indicates a different role of AGREE for local person vs. third person and plural. Recent work as shown that local person has special syntactic licensing needs (e.g. Béjar and Rezác 2003, Baker 2008, Preminger 2011b). Third person and plural on the other hand, I argue, are syntactically wellformed on their own, but require AGREE to be visible to lexical insertion at PF. Failure to AGREE will lead to absence of morphological realization or ungrammaticality as a function of the features involved. Once restrictions on third person arguments are treated as syntactic, much of the variation across languages in their morphological realization follows from differences in the PF-inventory. The second situation, two probes AGREEING with the same goal, arises in agreement with objects in Hindi-Urdu. The second part of the dissertation discusses two asymmetries in agreement of T with subjects and objects in conjunction structures. While T-agreement with objects shows sensitivity to linear order (i.a. closest conjunct agreement), T-agreement with subjects does not. I argue that the differences follow from the activity of the goal at the time of agreement. While subjects are syntactically active at the time T probes them, objects are not, because they have already been assigned case by v. As a consequence, the syntactic relation between T and an object cannot value the T's probe in the syntax. Non- syntactic effects like the relevance of linear order affect agreement exactly when valuation cannot be achieved in the syntax. Both case studies lead to the proposal that syntactically wellformed derivations can be ruled out at PF by failure of lexical insertion. This can happen in two ways. The discus- sion of restrictions on clitic combinations will lead to the conclusion that some languages allow the syntax to generate wellformed structures that contain nodes with so few features that PF cannot insert an exponent for them. The discussion of agreement in Hindi-Urdu will lead to the proposal that the grammar can generate feature bundles with inconsistent features that cannot be spelled out in one form. Overall, PF does both less and more than is often assumed. The restrictions on third person and plural discussed in the first part are traditionally considered to be the result of morphological operations that change the feature content of clitics (Bonet 1991, 1993, 1995, Grimshaw 1997, Noyer 1997). The proposal here reduces the role of PF in these restrictions to spelling out syntactic structures that have reduced feature content as the result of syntactic interactions. Similarly, the proposal about Hindi-Urdu tightly delimits the space where non-syntactic effects on agreement arise. At the same time, PF can rule out syntactically wellformed structures, which is not typically assumed to be possible.

This dissertation contributes to an ongoing debate on the types of linguistic features which can be acquired in a second language by looking at the multiple learning challenges related to the ergative case system (the appearance of –ne with the subject) in Hindi-Urdu by classroom learners. Some hypotheses in second language research hold that interpretable features (features which contribute semantic information) can be acquired in a second language, whereas uninterpretable features (features which express grammatical information) cannot be easily acquired, if ever. Additionally, hypotheses in second language processing hold that the second language learners are able to process semantic information but not grammatical information. This dissertation investigates at the acquisition process of second language learners of Hindi-Urdu acquiring the uninterpretable ergative case. In Hindi-Urdu, the subject of a sentence appears with the ergative case marker –ne, when the verb is transitive and in the perfective aspect. In my dissertation, I test the validity of the aforementioned hypotheses and investigate the acquisition and acquisitional process of ergative case in L2 Hindi-Urdu by L1 English speakers by analyzing data collected by using an acceptability/grammaticality judgement task, a self-paced reading task and a production task from Hindi-Urdu learners and native speakers.

The thesis deals with the historical development of the grammatical tradition of Hindi languages, focusing mainly on selected specifics of Hindi grammar - ergative constructions, absolutive, and verbo-verbal expressions. The aim of this thesis is to compare and clarify the development of understanding of the above mentioned language phenomena and to find out what was the approach of individual authors to Hindi, what terminology they used, and what role their education and the background conditions played. At the same time, the thesis deals with the very reason of the origin of individual grammars in the context of historical development of the Indian subcontinent.

Among Urdu’s many verb+verb constructions, this thesis focuses on those constructions, which combine the stem of a main content verb with another inflected verb which is used in a semantically bleached sense. Prior work on these constructions has been focused on their structural make-up and syntactic behavior in various environments. While there is consensus among scholars (Butt 1995, Hook 1977, Carnikova 1989, Porizka 2000 et al.) that these stem+verb constructions encode aspectual information, to date no clear theory has been put forward to explain the nature of their aspectual contribution. In short, we do not have a clear idea why these constructions are used instead of simple verbs. This work is an attempt to understand the precise function of these constructions. I propose that simple verbs (henceforth SV) in Urdu deal only with the action of the verb whereas (regardless of the semantic information contributed by the second inflected verb,1) the stem+verb constructions essentially deal with the action of the verb as well as the state of affairs resulting from this action. The event represented by these constructions is essentially a telic event as defined by Comrie (1976), whose resultant state is highlighted from the use of these constructions. The attention of the listener is then shifted to the result of this telic event, whose salience in the discourse is responsible for various interpretations of the event; hence my term ‘resultive construction’ (henceforth RC). When these constructions are made using the four special verbs (rah ‘stay’, sak ‘can’, paa ‘manage’ and cuk ‘finish’), the product is not resultive. Each of these verbs behaves differently and is somewhere between a resultive and an auxiliary verb construction. This work can be extended to other verb-verb construction in Urdu and other related and non-related languages as well. The analysis of the precise function of the RCs can also help in developing a model for them in various functional grammars. The proposed properties of RCs can be utilized in the semantic analysis of the Urdu quantifiers. This work should aid in identification and explanation of constructions in other languages, particularly those that are non-negatable under normal contexts. [1] All second inflected verbs with the exception of four special verbs rah ‘stay’, sak ‘can’, paa ‘manage’ and cuk ‘finish’. These four special verbs are either auxiliaries or modals as identified in prior literature.