Abstract
The present study aims at establishing grammatical constraints on the borrowing of nouns (Ns) and verbs (Vs) in Urdu and English by adopting Noam Chomsky’s Methodological Naturalism within the field of generative grammar as the theoretical framework of the study. For this purpose, the corpus of Pure Urdu and Pure English sentences from textbooks and the Oxford Dictionary of English was used in this study. The data were analyzed in the light of Minimalist Program, and the findings of the study reveal that there are certain grammatical constraints on the borrowing of Vs in Urdu from Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Hindi as compared with English. It is observed that whenever Urdu borrows Vs from other languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, it adds its little v with the fossil form of borrowed verbs in order to retain the grammaticality of the sentence while in English Vs borrowed from Latin, old English is said to be used in their fossil form and can be used with the inflection of the English and has no effect on the grammaticality of the sentence. The reason observed is the drop v phenomenon. Urdu does not drop its little v due to which whenever it borrows Vs it adds its little v along with root form of borrowed Vs otherwise the resulting structure is considered as ungrammatical. If we talk about the borrowed Ns, there are no grammatical constraints on their borrowing because they can inflect with inflectional morphology of Urdu and English language.
Introduction
By employing nouns (Ns) and verbs (Vs) borrowed by English and Urdu as data, the present study attempts to explore the grammatical constraints on the borrowing of Ns and Vs to establish the fact that the languages which have dropped their little v tend to inflect borrowed syntactic categories and those which have not dropped their little v do not inflect the borrowings of certain grammatical categories (Gumperz, 1982; Malik, 2017; Quarcoo, 2012; Wani, 2007). Because it is assumed that Urdu does not drop its little v, therefore, whenever it borrows Ns it inflects them with its morphology but in case of Vs it shows different behavior as compared with English language in the sense that it takes borrowed Vs in their root forms and add its little v (due to having its overt status) to maintain the grammaticality of the expression in the light of Minimalist Program (MP; Adger & Svenonius, 2011).
In bilingual speech community, it is thought that two languages interact and influence each other (Poplack, 1983, 2000). The interaction between the two languages results in the phenomena of language contact and interaction. According to Weinreich (1979), the phenomena of language contact have a great variety of manifestations in different fields including language acquisition, language processing, and production, conversation, and discourse, social functions of language and language policy and language change as well. Language contact is regarded as a situation in which speakers of two or more languages interact and influence each other (Bentahila & Davies, 1983). It emerges as an area of investigation for researchers not only in the domain of linguistics and sociolinguistics but it also attracts the interest of scholars of other domains such as phonology, morphology, syntax, and psychology. The results of language contact are of primary importance due to which it is hard to ignore them such as code-switching, code-mixing, language convergence, and borrowing (Bouamrane, 1989; Hudson, 1996).
Haugen’s (1956) article on borrowing marks the beginning of interest of researchers toward the study of borrowing. The major focus of research at the end of the 1970s and 1980s was to uncover the certain type of constraints on the process of borrowing. It was evident that the most bilingual data comprised of borrowed words of different categories, and it was also noted that some categories are borrowed more than others. The essential objective of the studies that focused on the formulation of constraints on borrowing was to explain why certain sort of categories was more likely to be borrowed as compared with other categories. Appel and Muysken (1987) provide an overview of different approaches that were designed to solve this problem and discuss the principles that govern the so-called hierarchies of borrow-ability—also known as the scale of “adoptability” (Haugen, 1956).
Haugen (1956) in his work adopted the hierarchies formulated by Whitney (1881) and elaborate it in his own work “Nouns-other parts of Speech-Suffixes-Inflection-sounds.” Similarly, Muysken (1981) on the basis of his analysis of Spanish borrowing in Quechua formulates the following hierarchy “Nouns-Adjectives-Verb-Preposition-Coordinating Conjunctions-Quantifiers-Determiners-Free Pronoun-Clitic Pronoun-Subordinating conjunctions.”
Appel and Muysken (1987) tried to explain that paradigmatic and syntagmatic coherence relations in language are based on these hierarchies. They illustrated that the pronoun system of a language is tightly organized than the adjectives due to which they impose that pronouns are less likely to be borrowed. Moravcsik (1978) posits constraints on borrowings in terms of implicational universals which are reinterpreted by Matras (1998) as follows: “elements that show structural autonomy and referential stability are more likely to be affected by contact than those that display stronger structural dependency and referential vagueness or abstractness” (p. 23).
Baker (1997) and Thomason (2007) showed that there is found a difference between languages which are equipped with heavy borrowing from genuinely mixed languages. Recently, a number of studies are conducted in which the linguists try to highlight the structural effects of borrowing. Dixon (2006) and Matras and Sakel (2007) studied the structural borrowing by analyzing a number of languages. Salmons (1990) is regarded as one of the major studies that for the first time brings into limelight the borrowing from the level of grammar to the level of pragmatics and discourse. Matras (1998, 2000) constraint-based approach toward borrowing is important because he mingled up the pragmatic and psycholinguistics considerations in the analysis of constraints on borrowing.
Though there were many studies conducted related to the borrowing in which researchers tried to investigate certain constraints on this phenomenon, but all those constraints were frequency based. Therefore, in the present study, the researcher tried to investigate the phenomena of “Borrowing” especially in terms of positing grammatical constraints on the borrowing of Ns and Vs in Urdu and English language pair. English which is regarded as the most influential language across the world shows its influences on Urdu language in spite of the fact that Urdu itself is considered as one of the great languages. Akin to other languages, English has also borrowed words from other languages but today it serves as a donor language. The major reasons behind becoming its primary source for other languages to borrow words are scientific and technological development and advancement. Borrowing is considered a natural phenomenon; when different languages come into contact, their influences are hard to be ignored (Hoffer, 2002). This phenomenon dates back to the existence of human beings on this earth. Around the world, many languages have been influenced by this phenomenon and Urdu-English languages are not separate from other languages. Both Urdu and English languages are influenced by a number of languages across the world. For this purpose, following research questions are addressed:
Literature Review
Syntax is treated as a cognitive system within the framework of Minimialist Program (MP) on the basis of the rejection of deep structure (DS) and surface structure (SS) structure of government binding (GB) theory (Chomsky, 1981). The sharp difference between GB and MP was established on the basis of levels of grammar. In GB theory of language, there are four levels of syntactic representation: (a) Deep Structure (DP), (b) Surface Structure (SS), (c) Logical Form (LF), and (d) Phonological Form (PL). But as the core idea of MP is to provide a minimal account of language, these levels of representation were reduced into two including LF and phonological form (PF). Syntax which is considered as a cognitive system in MP further bridges with two other cognitive systems namely Articulatory-Perceptual (A-P) and Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) systems. As reported by Chomsky (1985), a syntactic model is required to highlight the levels of interfaces where the cognitive systems A-P and I-C can interact to transform the linguistic features embedded in syntactic categories into signals transmitted toward brain for the production and interpretation of language.
There are only two interface levels recognized within MP as LF (Logical Form—meaning) and PF (Phonological Form—sound). These are the interface levels where the grammar of a particular language deals with semantics and phonology of the selected syntactic categories. Another system namely computational system which is regarded as a cognitive component of language faculty of human brain plays a vital role in linking sound and meaning to their respective interface levels PF and LF. These interface levels are related to the interpretability and valuation of features. As a matter of fact, it is demanded by the Principle of Full Interpretation (FI) that all the features that are uninterpretable should be deleted before the interface levels. These features can be valued with the help of Sensory-Motor Interpretation because the FI principles are considered as a matter of phonology, that is, if a symbol in derivational representation does not entitle as PF representation and same is the case with LF representation (Chomsky, 1995).
More exactly, the interface levels deal with the interpretable features because it is said that if the features are not checked/valued, then there will be a problem in the derivation it may be crashed or it can be canceled. Syntactic Derivation is canceled if there is no compatibility found between the lexical item (LI) at the start of the computational procedure and derivation is crashed due to the violation of Principle of Full Interpretation which results in the crash of system at the spell-out. To resolve the problem of features evaluation, Chomsky (1995) introduced some syntactic operations which can be employed to check/value the feature such as, Operation Agree and Operation Move which are discussed in detail in the following sections. The lexical categories having only semantic and phonological contents are permitted to reach at the interface of LF and PF because the fulfillment of interface condition is required. The interface condition states that all the features should be compatible and checked before moving toward the interface levels to make the derivation successful. Keeping in mind the interpretability condition of interface levels, let’s move toward different features and their interpretability (Johnson & Lappin, 1997).
Chomsky (1995) argues that each lexical category is equipped with a set of phonological, semantic, and formal features. Each lexical category is said to have features which are used to explain a peculiar grammatical property. For example, the difference between a count and uncounted nouns might be described in terms of a feature such as [+-COUNT]. A feature of lexical items (LIs) can be both interpretable and uninterpretable. Interpretable Features play a role in semantic representation and uninterpretable features play no role in semantic representation. Interpretable features are regarded as Theta/Phi feature. Nevertheless, according to Chomsky, Interpretable features are already valued in the lexicon, besides, there are also other types of features function known as un-interpretable features which are needed to be valued during the process of derivation. For example, if we talk about pronoun THEY, its theta-features such as number and person are interpretable but its case-features are uninterpretable because its case-features such as nominative, accusative, or genitive depend upon the clause in which it occurs and it does not affect the meaning such as, 1-It is said [they were hanged] 2-He expected [them to be hanged] 3-He was shocked at [their being hanged]
But if we talk about auxiliaries the case is reverse; the case-feature of auxiliaries are un-interpretable while theta-feature in terms of tense-features are interpretable. As mentioned above interpretable features play an important role in computing semantic representation while un-interpretable features do not pay any contribution to this process, why it is so? Chomsky provided the answer in the form of features visibility convention. According to which ‘‘Any un-interpretable feature deleted in the syntax is invisible to the semantic component, but remains visible in the syntactic component and in the PF component.” Theta-features assign thematic roles of a language. They are regarded as the semantic roles played by an argument in relation to its predicates such as in the form of AGENT, THEME, and Goal. For example, Ali abused Usman; in this example, the verb abused assigns the theta-role Agent to the subject of the sentence Ali and Theta-Role Theme to its complement Usman. Thematic role in the hierarchy specifies where an argument carrying a given theta-role should be merged (Kratzer, 1996). As discussed above the interface levels, PF and LF play a significant role in the derivation of a sentence. Furthermore, these levels perform their function in linking up to the faculty of language to the other two systems, namely, A-P and C-me. Moving toward the designs of the faculty of language under the framework of MP, it consisted of two components: A language-specific component, lexicon, and a language-independent component, computational system.
The computational system is regarded as the language-independent component. Under MP it is assumed that structures are derived within the computational component of FL. The computational system consists of different components which combined together to make the derivation of the sentence successful. These components are named as the overt syntax, covert syntax, spell-out, PF, and LF. The initial stage of the computational system is the process of numeration. Numeration is a process which decides what type of lexical entries are selected and how many types these are used in the derivation (Chomsky, 1995). Numeration may be considered as a set of lexical categories including their index as well. When the lexical items are selected, then two operations namely select and Merge operate together. The operation selects demands that all the lexical items from numeration should be arranged in proper order to attain a convergent derivation (Chomsky, 1995). After the selection of lexical items, the operation Merge is in action, which Merges the items together in terms of their compatibility with each other. Then these merged items are sent toward the spell-out to hand over them to the phonological and logical components so that they assign them sound and meaning.
Lexicon is regarded as a language-specific component and includes the following information: the form and meaning of lexical items, lexical categorization, appropriate usage of lexical items, relationship between these lexical items, and categories of lexical items (Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Prior and Gollan (2011) argue that phonological and grammatical rules are not part of lexicon because both deal with the external interfaces of computational system PF (phonetic form) and LF (logical form) and here the languages vary from each other. In other words, we can say that lexicon is the collection of lexical items—the internalized dictionary that native speaker of a language equipped with. It may be regarded as the vocabulary of a language, together with the information about the use and meaning of each item in it. A reductionist approach is being used for describing lexicon in the minimal description (Marian & Kaushanskaya, 2007). According to this approach, the reality consists of a minimal number of parts, and explanation of something should be provided in terms of smaller entities scientifically; a newer theory is the reduced or minimal form of older in the form of specific terms. Lexical items are regarded as the basic building block of a language’s vocabulary. These items are also known as word forms or lexemes, which may be defined as a minimal form that conveys one meaning and can be used in reference or predication. It is regarded as a mental unit, which is considered to be found in abstract form but used to unite all the morphological variant of a single word. For example, “Go” is a lexeme or lexical entity whose morphological variants are “goes, going, gone, went,” and so forth. Syntactic information that is enclosed in the lexical entities of the lexicon is visible to grammar (Mahajan, 1990). Lexicon plays a crucial role in the human language computational system because it is that part of the language which is considered to be universal and independent. The process in the computational system begins from lexicon which is comprised of different operations to create a derivation. It takes lexical items from lexicon as its input for the numeration in selectional operation which is further handed over to merge operation to unite all the selected lexical entities in sequence, after which the arranged items sent to spell-out stage of computational system to get its output from external interfaces (PF) and (LF).
At the stage of spell-out, the features of lexical entities should be checked/valued to link sound and meaning which is considered as the primary function of the computational system. To create a link between sound and meaning, there must be found compatibility among features of the lexical entities which helps the computational system to work smoothly and produce well-formed grammatical sentences. There are different kinds of syntactic operations which are used in the derivation of well-formed grammatical sentences. In technical terms the computation used for building structures in syntax are the combinations of several syntactic operations named: Select, Merge, Move, and agree with the purpose of producing minimal derivational cost in the Computational process. The most important concept and one of the fundamentals of computation within MP are of “Select and Merge.” These two syntactic mechanisms are considered as the basics of any natural languages’ theory. According to Chomsky (1995), both these operations do not incur any cost in the derivational procedure because these both are not involved in the convergence and economy of the derivation. The operation Merge is regarded as binary in nature because it is used to merge two syntactic objects that are present separately in the lexicon and transfer them into a combined object (Chomsky, 1995).
As illustrated above, the merge operation combines the items L and M into K, while K demonstrates the projection of one from these two. In Merge, two important relations were observed: sisterhood relation and immediate-contain relation due to its binary nature. The sisterhood relation can be observed between L and M, while the immediate-contain relation could be observed between (K, L) and (K, M). With the help of these relations, a very significant relation of c-command was derived. C-command is a basic relation within MP considered as a product of language faculty (Chomsky, 2014). According to MP, it was assumed that all the phrases and clauses should be built from words with the help of different Merge operations, because words are said to have selectional features which decide what sort of category can be merged with another category. For example, A head D consists of uninterpretable features of (N), which implies that it must merge with a noun resulting in DP.
Operation Move is another significant operation used in the derivation of a well-formed grammatical sentence. When the selected items are arranged in their respective positions in the representation through the help of operation Merge, then other operations came into action to provide an optimal output of the selected items. As discussed in the literature, the items which merged with each other possess a set of features, among them, some are un-interpretable. Therefore, in the light of Principle of Full Interpretation, such features must be deleted and checked before the stage prior to LF. In the light of earlier mentioned minimalist literature (Chomsky, 1995), the uninterpretable features are checked with the help of features checking process, a process due to which uninterpretable features are not visible to LF but are Visible to the computational system, so that they can be deleted (Chomsky, 1995).
As claimed by Chomsky (2014), operation move is the result of a feature-checking process which forces the application of Move. The operation Move raises the item having uninterpretable features toward the specifier position of a functional head so that its uninterpretable features could be checked against the interpretable features of the functional phrase. In the later version of GB, the process of feature checking assumed to be in action at the specifier position of Agr (element) phrases. But later, Chomsky (1995) reduces the concept of Agr phrases because these are not interpretable at the level of LF. Though Chomsky (1995) diminishes the concept of Agr phrases, still to date uninterpretable features are checked at the position of a specifier in the derivational process. He supposes that the mechanism of feature checking operates at the specifier position of tense phrase (TP) and verb phrase (VP).
There are two different movements with the help of which features can be checked, namely, overt movement and covert movement. In overt movement, the lexical categories having uninterpretable features are raised from their latent position toward the higher specifier site, so that its features are checked, while in covert movement the lexical items do not raise covertly, here their features’ covert movement is assumed to be taken place. According to Chomsky (1995), the covert or overt movement of uninterpretable features known as Move F. The central concept is that syntactic operation Move comes into action due to the morphological consideration: means some features of lexical categories (F) must be valued. This minimal Operation used to raise just only feature F (Chomsky, 1995). Both types of movement overt or covert exist within the framework of MP, but the overt movement is not preferred because it incurs additional cost in the computational procedure as compared with covert move.
To provide more explanation related to this operation, Chomsky (1995) marks a sharp difference between syntactic features. For this purpose, he classifies syntactic feature into two classes: those having a semantic explanation (for example, a pronoun having the features of [3F, PL] is quite different from the pronoun having the feature of [3M, SG]), and those having no semantic representation because they possess pure syntactic feature named as Formal Features (Chomsky, 2001). The features having semantic interpretation are regarded as interpretable features, which are valued before they enter into the process of computation, while on the contrary are formal features which are required to be checked and deleted in the derivational process. So, it is required that at spell-out all the features must be checked and valued. The basic interpretable features are theta-features on DPs and tense-features on T as compared with these, interpretable features are theta-features on T, v, C, a tense-feature on V, EPP features on T, C, v, Neg and case-features. All the syntactic projections are triggered due to the occurrence of uninterpretable features which must be checked and deleted because it is argued that uninterpretable features have no semantic interpretation at spell-out and should be deleted in the computational procedure prior to the stage of spell-out to have semantic representation.
Since Operation agreement shows the relationship between probe and goal or in other words we can say that it shows the relationship between a lexical item and a feature in its domain. Operation agree is applicable to c-command because it is thought that it has some features due to which other features can be valued. It can be explained with the help of the following example: They are lying
Due to “agree operation,” the person/number features of the auxiliary “are” in the above sentence get assigned the same value as those of its subject “‘they,”’ so that “are” is third-person plural because it agrees in person and number with its third person plural subject “‘they.”’ Operation Agree can be illustrated with the help of diagram of the sentence: “BOOK OF ASLAM.”
Research Methods and Materials
The study of “grammatical constraints on the borrowing of Ns and Vs in Urdu and English” was investigated in the light of “Naturalistic Research Approach,” mostly used for linguistic inquiries. This approach was introduced especially for the study of language within the framework of generative grammar proposed and followed by Noam Chomsky. The primary idea of the naturalistic methodology is that language should be studied as a science like other branches of science such as biology, physic, and psychology. This is also known as one of the recurring themes in most of Chomsky’s writings. Because Chomsky studied language as a component of the human mind, he coined the study of language and mind as “Methodological naturalism” which operates as the framework of whole Chomskyan’s linguistics. In light of this research approach, language should be studied and investigated in the same way as we investigate another phenomenon of the natural world. The aim of employing methodological naturalism is to provide an explanatory description of the phenomenon being studied.
The major purpose of this approach is to uncover the underlying principles on behalf of the empirical data to explore new issues and concepts moving from their description toward theorizing and making a generalization about the phenomena under investigation. The operative tools and mechanisms of applying this methodology were provided by Chomsky in terms of “MP” (1995 and subsequent works). Naturalistic methodology helped the researcher to find certain sets of ideas which serve as the underlying principles used for the investigation of the particular phenomenon of language within linguistic inquiries. It helps the researcher to procure theoretical dimensions for the subject under investigation.
Under this approach, Chomsky (2000) prescribes that the study of language is regarded as the essential part of “Naturalistic Inquiry” (pp. 76-78, 106). So language should be observed and investigated as a natural phenomenon. Hereby calling language as a natural phenomenon means describing it as a scientific practice. According to Chomsky, the study of language should be empirical in nature, and linguistic (language) theories should be evaluated on the basis of general criteria as set for any other scientific study. As put forwarded by Chomsky, in the naturalistic inquiry of phenomena, there is a need for explanatory and descriptive theories. Because it is not enough to just describe a particular object besides description, an explanatory note is also necessary for that particular object (language). Therefore, a language theory should have descriptive and explanatory adequacy to explain the data empirically. The theory of language will provide a full explanation of what is known by the idealized speaker of a particular language, while the theory will be explanatory in the sense “in what ways a particular language could originate from an invariable initial stage underneath the “boundary constraints” imposed by the experiences (Chomsky, 1965, pp. 24-26, 2000, p. 7). Therefore, this naturalistic approach is at best according to the nature of the study because the explanatory adequacy regarded as the essential path of MN and furthermore “explanatory theories” require the explanation of empirical data in particular to explore new issues and concepts moving from their description toward theorizing and making generalization about the phenomena under investigation.
Language within Chomskyan’s perspective was studied as a component of human language faculty which in itself is regarded as a component of the human mind. As Chomsky argued that “The human brain consists of a component known as ‘the language faculty’ the major concern of which is language and its use” (Chomsky, 2000, p. 77). About faculty of human language, he holds the view that it is possessed by every human species and considered as a biological endowment, which further interacts with other two systems, namely, the cognitive system and sensorimotor system. Initially, he holds the idea that FL remained constant throughout different species having quite a slight variation based on the experience which they received as an ‘input’ from surrounding. On the basis of which, he put forward that languages are more similar to each other than having certain differences. The concept of having FLs shows that for the study of language only the ability to speak and understand language is not enough, rather the need to understand the inner mental conditions had become necessary within Chomskyan’s natural research approach toward the study of language.
Within Chomskyan’s generative grammar, language is considered as an internal individual and intentional property of human mind (Chomsky, 2000). By calling language intentional, Chomsky wants to propose that languages are a particular mechanism that can be employed for the generation of infinite expression of a language and only expression of grammatical nature (Chomsky, 2000). By calling language as internal component, Chomsky means that it is a property of human mind\brain, due to which it becomes clear that if a particular language is the property of the human brain than it is internalized characteristics of human species which could be traced within the mind/brain of the person. It is quite plausible to say within “methodological naturalism” that the object should be scientific, real object—which is human language faculty. On the basis of this, we can argue that the semantic content of a sentence is considered as the intergalactic characteristic of the generation expression, which in turn, is determined by human language faculty. After describing language as internal and intentional within Chomsky’s generative grammar, he argued that the study of a language should be computational in nature.
Chomsky holds the view within generative grammar is that when a speaker has the knowledge of a language, he produces the linguistic expression of his particular language, which is composed of different lexical items drawn from Lexicon rested in human language faculty (Chomsky, 2000). It is argued that lexical items are equipped with semantic and phonological content in terms of certain features. On the basis of which, he supposes language as a lexicon which consists of a set of lexical items which are regarded as the subject of computation for the computational component of the language faculty. The computational procedure comes into action and performs different operations (operation select and merge, Numeration, move, agree). After performing these operations, the generated linguistic expression sent to outer spell-out phase of the computational procedure to assign them thematic and semantic and phonological content.
Which are considered as the part of “syntax” or syntactic process of the computational system which later are linked up with the semantic and phonological aspect of the human language faculty? Because it was argued that the study of language is not just the study of rules and principle common for generating specific “L” expressions, it also includes the study of other mental representation. According to Noam Chomsky, the expression “A” of a particular language “L” considered as a set <SEM, PHON> in which each entity comprised of information related to the meaning and sound of respective linguistic items. The <PHON> content consisted of the sound related to that expression (A), while semnatic content consisted of meaning related to that expression(A) then these interfaces send instruction to the performance machinery of human computational system in order to assign them their respective content to make them able to be used of by the speaker. This representation of the generated expression of a particular ‘L” is considered a purely syntactic mechanism in nature.
Many studies were conducted related to the phenomena of “Borrowing,” and all the studies differ from each other in respect of the methods they used and the type of data they used to elaborate their point of the study. Some of the researchers go for only naturalistic data while others prefer elicited data. Herein, the researcher used natural research approach as discussed above to investigate the naturally occurring phenomenon of borrowing of Ns and Vs in Urdu and English language. To this end, the researcher employed data collected from textbooks of Punjab Board, Urdu and English Dictionaries and some portion of data were also accessed through browsing on the Internet. The list of 400 borrowed items was obtained from textbooks and their etymology was accessed from different websites, and then from that list, a set of 200 items were selected randomly to achieve the objective of the study. Furthermore, from these 200 items, 160 items were again used randomly in different sentences, divided into equal 4 classes having 40 sentences of each category as, 40 of Urdu Vs, 40 of Urdu Ns, 40 of English Vs and 40 of English Ns. For the analysis of data, MP as the theoretical framework was employed. A descriptive account of data analysis was given to characterize the phenomenon of borrowing of Ns and Vs in Urdu and English so that the findings from the analysis are generalizable for borrowed Ns and Vs.
Findings and Discussion
The Case of Borrowed Vs and Their Syntactic Constructions in Urdu and English
The case of Vs borrowing in Urdu is considered an important issue because of its nature due to having being borrowed. The borrowed Vs in Urdu language always comes in its root form and demand (for retaining the grammaticality of sentences) little v of Urdu as proposed in MP, that every sentence ever produced by a human being would be grammatical in nature (Butt, 2010). If we talk about the little v of Urdu language such as ker, kerna, hona, liya etc. then the construction of these Vs is very complicated in Urdu syntax and in this respect, a little work but significant in nature was done by Malik (2017). This study would be significant in terms of providing more literature on this phenomenon. Let’s move forward toward the elaboration of this particular issue in the light of different Urdu/English mixed sentences. Before venturing toward it, one thing should be kept in mind that in this study the instances of v Ker and Ho were discussed in the present study. The Urdu little v “ker” which is regarded as a transitive agentive verb used with different verbs of English, when they are borrowed in Urdu to give full semantic and thematic content of it (Butt & Rizvi, 2010), so that the grammaticality of the sentence could not be affected. Consider the following illustration in this respect: 1. Socrāt unhien saach bolnay ki talqeen karta hai Socrates N/Mes/SG them Pro/PL truth N/SG of ad instruct V/ Asp/SG dov T/Asp/ be T/Asp/SG/Pre Socrates instructs them to speak the truth 2. Tamam insan azad aur huquq o izzat ke itibaar se baraber paida hotay hain. All humans N/PL free N/SG and Int rights N/PL and dignity N/SG-Acc consideration N/SG from ad equal N/SG borne V/T/Asp/SG are T/Asp/PL All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. 3. Unhen ek dusre ke sath bhai chare ka suluk karna cahie. TheyD N/PL one another Pro-Acc with adj brotherhood N/SG of Ad treatment V/Asp/S Do v/T/Asp/SG should Mod. They should treat each other in a spirit of brotherhood. 4. Sub teachers Ali ke iss rawayie ko pasand karte hain. AllD N/PL teachers N/PL Ali N/SG-Acc thisD attitude N/SG of Ad like V/Asp/SG do v be T/Asp/SG/Pre All teachers like Ali’s attitude.
All the Vs used in the above sentence such as paida, suluk, pasand, talqeen are said to be borrowed from Arabic, Persian. Some of the borrowed Vs were said to be used as Verb in their original language while are said to have a different grammatical category in the original language as comparing at being borrowed Vs in the Urdu language (Butt, 2003). It is quite clear that in all the above Urdu pure sentences, different Vs borrowed from different languages as discussed earlier having Urdu’s little v along with it to convey the semantic and thematic content of the produced expression. Now if we talk about the syntactic procedure that is involved in the construction of such sentences let us have a look at the syntactic representation of one of the sentences mentioned above as: 5. Sub teachers Ali ke iss rawayie ko pasand karte hain.
Here in this sentence, first of all, the N rawayie from Urdu select and merged with the Urdu D iss resulting into the formation of DP-node, which further merged with the V pasand that assign it theta-role and another node named VP is formed as the result of this merge. The little v of Urdu “ker” is selected by this VP since v is regarded as a transitive agentive little verb, which starts for looking at a goal with theta-complete features to check its uninterpretable features (Kachru, 1970, 2006). Little v serves as probe and is looking for its theta-complete goal and here in this sentence the DP serving as an object is selected by v so that its unvalued features could be interpreted and get valued through the help of operation Agr. The probe’s theta-features could be valued against the object DP’s unvalued case-features. Because it is said that Urdu v has strong EPP feature, the object DP is raised toward the specifier position of Vp (Butt & Lahiri, 2013). Furthermore, it also triggered the DP to the spell-out for the purpose of its interpretation. It should be kept in mind that DP serving as object has been moved out from VP and occupies the specifier position in VP phrase in a syntactic derivation (Kachru, 2006).
When the first spell-out has been taken place, then v further select the subject DP tamaam (all) teachers and merged with it. In addition to this, the Urdu N ustaaza selected by Urdu D sub to form DP. It is argued that DP has theta-features valued and case-features unvalued which need to be valued during the syntactic derivational process (Butt & Lahiri, 2013). Like functional category D, T also has theta-feature unvalued and case-features valued and therefore to have its theta-features be checked, it starts searching for a theta-complete goal in its c-command. Here in this sentences, there are two DPs one in its inactive form due to having its feature checked and has been sending to spell-out for interpretation and other DP sub ustaaza (teachers) is in its active form having case-features needed to be checked (Kachru, 2006). T serving as probe selects the DP as its active goal and gets it theta-features checked and valued while, on the contrary, DP having unvalued case-features triggered toward the specifier position of T to satisfy its EPP features (Butt, 2010). After this, the theta-features and case-features of both T and DP are valued and send toward spell-out for interpretation. Then a null complementizer was introduced in the sentence which is in active form and takes the whole TP as its goal to build cCP.
As we see that in all the above sentences the verbs hifazaat (protection), salook (treatment), pasand (liking), talqeen (advice), and so forth all are borrowed from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit into Urdu discourse and all are said to be used in their base forms having little v of Urdu to convey its semantics content but if we reverse the case, means if we add all the verbal inflections to the root forms of the borrowed verbs, then it would violate the phonological and semantic rules of the MP that might be resulted in ungrammatical utterances. As Malik (2017), in his work “No Mixed Grammars, No Phonological Disjunction: A New Perspective on Intra-Sentential Code-Switching” proposed the MP in which he argued that codes from one language to another tend to shift and they will always follow the grammar of only one language either of the donor language or of the recipient language. There is no concept of two grammars for generating a sentence within MP (Koul, 2008). And he further elaborated that it happens only on the phonological level in the human computational system which is used to provide phonological content to the received syntactic constituents. In addition to this, he elaborated that only those constituents which have phonological content are allowed to be passed on the PF interface level to avoid a crash in the derivational process because unpronounceable words are not allowed to enter at the level of the interface during the computational procedure. And there is only one Phonological component in the Computational system of human beings which deals with all the units coming from any language, though of mixed expression of two or more languages. There is no separate phonological component for every language as proposed by Macswan (2008) in his work. This could be applied to the phenomena of Vs borrowing in Urdu language in which if we add the Urdu verbal inflection to English root verb, then it will contain unpronounceable content which results in the crash of the derivation and sentence will be ungrammatical in nature. Consider the following sentences in this respect: 6. *Aap ibn-e Suleman ke sath yeah bartau-te hain. 7. * Iss liye baith kr ghuftughu-ta tha 8. *Sir Saeed ney muslmano ko shirkat-ne sy rouka. 9. * Mauashee maslae par ghour-ne ke liye kameeti banai geiے 10. * Iss tarah himat afzai-te thae
From the above examples, it becomes evident that Urdu verbal inflection could be used with the fossil form of the borrowed Vs because the consequences of such integration result in the formation of ungrammatical sentences, which is not possible within the framework of MP (Chomsky, 1995). Note that * stand for ungrammatical sentence.
The verb “hona” is regarded as one of the irregular verbs of Urdu. It may function as both main verb and v within the various Urdu constructions. When it is said to be used with the borrowed Vs, then it would be used as little v not as the main verb because in those constructions borrowed Vs would serve as the main Vs. In its simple past tense form, it would be regarded as participial because they were to be in Agr relation with number and gender with respect to their subjects but not Agr in respect of person. Consider the following sentences in this respect: 11. Kaya sarae mamlaat aaj he haal hone hain what all matters today need resolve to be Do all matters need to be resolved today? 12. Yeah line seedhi kaichni hoti hai This line straight draw to be are This line has to be drawn straight. 13. Physics ke saary papers ki janch partaal ho gei hai. Physics *[‘s] all papers *[‘] check to be Are all the papers of physics checked? 14. Barishon ka sara pani dam men jamaa hota hai Rain *[‘] of all water dam in store to be All the water of rain is stored in the dam.
In all the abovementioned sentences, all the Vs are borrowed from other languages and they are said to be used with Urdu little v retaining their fossil form. Akin to the above discussed Vs, if we add the morphological inflections of Urdu with borrowed Vs then the resulting structures would be ungrammatical. Borrowed verb when said to be used with the inflection of Urdu then, first of all, it changed the grammatical sentence into an ungrammatical sentence. Second, it results in such constituents which are considered incompatible with each other and have certain phonological unpronounceable words due to which the derivation of the whole sentence is crashed causing higher derivational cost in the computational system. So, it could be argued in the light of these illustrations that, whenever be the Urdu borrow Vs from any other language, it would be used in their root forms having Urdu little v to make the derivation of the sentence possible and successful within the framework of MP. Because in MP, it was argued that human beings can produce only and only grammatical sentences which are infinite in number. Let us have a look at the morphological patterns of these Vs.
As compared with Urdu Vs borrowing if we talk about the case of borrowing in the English language, then it uncovers the morphological patterns of borrowed Vs in English and their resulting structures as well. And we will also come to know that English and Urdu which are known as mirror images of each other have sharp differences in terms of their borrowing capacities. In English, Vs are said to be borrowed in their original form, but they are observed to be inflected with its own morphology (Gardani, Arkadiev, & Amiridze, 2015). It can modify the borrowed Vs in various ways by adding suffixes to the fossil form of the borrowed Vs. Consider the following examples in this respect: 15. He is buying new cars constantly. He buys a new house. He bought different kinds of pen from the shop. 16. He walked towards graveyard. He is walking on the road. He walks towards the gallows. 17. He came to my party. He comes home late at night. 18. He produced different kinds of vegetables in his farm. He produces coca beans in his garden. He is producing new machinery used for the computerized vehicles.
In the above illustration, a single verb is used in three different sentences having a different form which are considered the combination of borrowed root Vs and morphological patterns of English. It is obvious from above empirical data that the addition of morphological forms of English with the fossil forms of borrowed Vs does not affect the grammaticality of the sentence. Let us have a look at the morphological patterns of the borrowed Vs in English. Now it becomes easier to say that in Urdu borrowed Vs are said to be used in their original form and take Urdu’s little v “Ker” and “Ho” and it could not be inflected with the morphological inflections of Urdu. As compare with Urdu, borrowed Vs in English could be used in their fossil form and could be inflected with English morphological inflections -s, -es, -ed, -ing to form different forms that could be used in different contexts.
The Case of Borrowed Ns and Their Syntactic Constructions in Urdu and English
As far as the case of Urdu Ns is concerned, they show gender and number such as Masculine–Feminine and Singular–Plural, respectively, and could be inflected for three different types of cases—direct, oblique, and vocative—but here in this study the notion of obliqueness was taken into consideration. The morphosyntactic features attached with Ns in Urdu are the feature which all the nouns carry within the lexicon of a particular language and the feature with which they inflect. In the present study, the English Ns borrowed into Urdu having Urdu case inflections would be considered as Ns borrowing. Consider the following examples in this respect: 1. Taama company-yo ki sim-on ka aik he hissab hai All companies *[‘] sims *[‘] one calculations is All company’s sim are alike. 2. Pakistani team tamaam team-on sy Afzal hai Pakistani team all teams from better is Pakistan team is better than all other teams. 3. Iss k pass sari diariyan hain He *[‘] near all dairies are He have all diaries. 4. Woh lakriyan kaat rahi hai That woods cut to be is She is cutting the wood. 5. Tamaam schoolon mein farq hota hai All schools in contrast to be is All schools are at variance from each other
Here the documented data above in (1) to (5) related to the borrowing of Ns borrowed from English, Persian, and Sanskrit inflecting with morphological patterns of Urdu marking theta-features and case-features of borrowed Ns. English borrowed N in Urdu “ٹیم” فیکٹری،میشن” inflected with Urdu “-on” a bound morpheme to pluralize the borrowed Ns with accusative case, whereas Persian “گھڑی” was inflected with Urdu “-ian” bound morpheme to pluralize it with the dative case. The instances could be considered as grammatical only if these are provided by Urdu Language. So, if one talks about the etymology of these Ns, then they were said to be borrowed items in English and in English itself they are borrowed from French, Latin sources.
To give strength to the idea, we may say that Urdu/English speakers (Malik, 2017) pronounce certain English Ns in Urdu either pure or mix sentences because it was observed that almost all the speakers in Pakistan tend to replace closing diphthong of the borrowed Ns along with pure bock vowel without taking into consideration either they are going to use it in pure sentence coming from Urdu or English, due to which the specific features which mark the distributive nature of English was lost when the Urdu/ English speakers replace a diphthong with a monodiphthong. So, Hussain, Mahmood, and Mahmood (2012) argue that if “team” is said to be used as an entity of English item by an English/Urdu speaker, its pronunciation will be without English diphthong but when “team” word inflect with the Urdu plural morphology (inflectional morphology) in (-on,-ian), it would be immediately identified as the case of borrowing in Urdu.
In all the examples illustrated above the English Ns, Grill, Book, Motorcycle, Pencil, and Table were said to be borrowed having Urdu inflections in respect of oblique case (gender-number) and above all the resulting structures were grammatical in nature (Mohanan, 1994). The borrowing of Ns having Urdu inflections fulfill all the conditions of MP such as of grammaticality, semantic, and phonology, because all the aforementioned examples are said to be grammatical and convey fully semantic content, there was not found any ambiguity on the understanding of such constructions on the part of the listeners. Furthermore, they did not possess any unpronounceable feature which could cause extra derivational cost on behalf of the computational system of human brain because all these sentences did not carry any incompatible constituent which could crash in the derivation of such syntactic structures (Mohanan, 1994, 2006). All this supports the major aim of our study that English-borrowed nouns can have Urdu inflectional morphology. Consider some more examples in this respect. From these data, it becomes evident that Ns borrowed in Urdu from English, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian could be inflected with Urdu morphology and capable of maintaining their grammaticality within the boundaries of Chomsky’s (2003, 2014) naturalistic research approach related to the study of language and its related phenomenon. If we talk about the borrowed Ns in English, they would show similar patterns of inflection means they could be inflected in certain ways by adding suffixes and affixes. Let us consider the following illustration related to the borrowed Ns in English language.
6. He has bought pencils from different shops. 7. She has a good collection of books. 8. He has three wives. 9. He shows his different brand cars. 10. There are many secret doors in this house
In all the above sentences, Borrowed Ns in English pluralized with English bound morphemes, -s, -es, -ies, ves, and so on. From the above-quoted instances and discussion carried on so far, one thing could be deducted that borrowed Ns in Urdu can be borrowed and used within Urdu context without violating any rules of grammaticality (Mohanan, 2006), depending on the context and content of the sentences in which they were used by the Urdu/English bilinguals. Furthermore, it could be argued in the light of the above illustrations that the nature of Ns borrowing differs from the nature of Vs borrowing in respect of their functionality within the Urdu discourse. Whenever Urdu borrow Vs from another language, it assigns its little v with the fossil form of the borrowed V because when it adds its inflection to the root form of the Vs the resulting structure would be ungrammatical, which is not acceptable within the Chomskyian framework of MP within the enterprise of generative grammar.
Conclusion
Findings of the study based on the data analyzed in the previous sections could be generalized for all borrowed Ns and Vs in Urdu and English. It could be argued that borrowing of Ns and Vs in Urdu and English does not take place randomly; rather, it is a systematic process. To be more precise, we could agree that it is a grammatical process in nature which had been proved theoretically on the basis of empirical data provided and analyzed in the previous section. The phenomenon of linguistic borrowing is considered a systematic phenomenon; it is not a random process at all, because it is argued that the insertion of each language is a systematic process, especially the means in which the semantic and phonological content is organized which is commonly known as a morphological arrangement (Sinha, 2009). The borrowed words are said to be fully integrated into the recipient language both morphologically and phonologically according to the procedure followed by the computational procedure of human language and whose specific property is language and whose study is the subject matter of naturalistic approach of Chomsky. As far as the notion of inflectional morphology of Ns borrowing is considered, it is regarded as one of the most intricate issues. As we assumed here the phenomena of Ns borrowing in terms of the MP (Chomsky, 1995), so we elaborate it within its boundaries. As the data in the “Findings and Discussion” section highlight, the fact that when Ns are borrowed from other languages into Urdu, they could inflect with the inflectional aspects of the Urdu morphology and the results of such insertion would be grammatical in nature (Spencer, Butt, & King, 2005). As we saw in the literature that the words which are syntactically, morphologically and phonologically inserted in the recipient language. Sometimes only syntactic and morphologically insertion was required to be the case of borrowing. But as mentioned earlier, the criteria for borrowing in this study based on the insertion of Urdu inflections with the borrowed Vs and Ns. The instances documented so far were considered as the illustration of borrowing and said to be inflected with the Urdu inflectional morphological aspects to form plurals of the singular forms of English Ns. All the structures illustrated above were said to be well-formed and grammatical because they carry full semantic content. As far as their construction is concerned, the same procedure is carried out as of a pure sentence. The items were said to be selected from the lexicons L1, L2, L3, …Ln. After their selection numeration of these items takes place, which will decide which item would be used and what would be its frequency? Then all the selected items merged with each other on the basis of compatibility of features among the selected lexical items (Poplack, Sankoff, & Miller, 1988). If the items were found to be incompatible, then the derivation of the sentence could be canceled, which would not incur any additional cost to the computational system. While, on the contrary, if the syntactic elements were said to be compatible, then they further moved toward the spell-out which hand over these constituents toward other interface forms, logical form which attribute semantic content to the sentence, and phonological form which attributed them phonological content, and the resulting structures would be of grammatical nature as mentioned above (Karimi-Doostan, 2005). Because the roots of Ns were of English and inflection of Urdu, it was assumed that it might be possible that it could carry some unpronounceable features, which would result in the crash of derivation in the computational system within the framework of MP. But on the basis of Empirical evidence in the form of Urdu/English corpus, it could be argued that there were no unpronounceable features observed attached to the borrowed Ns. They were said to have the potential of their use with Urdu morphology and did not observed any difficulty in the pronunciation of such words by Urdu/English bilinguals in their daily routine life interactions and communicative settings. Furthermore, it could be argued that it was observed that such types of Ns having a base form of English and inflection from Urdu did not cause any problem in their use. They were said to be integrated syntactically, morphologically, and above all phonologically in the Urdu. The study ends with imposing constraints on the borrowing of Vs as compared with Ns in Urdu and English. Whenever the Vs are said to be borrowed from other languages (Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit) into Urdu, they were observed to be used with Urdu little v “Ker-Ho” otherwise the generated expression would be ungrammatical in nature, while in English language it is not the same case. The reason behind such grammatical constraints is the drop v phenomenon because Urdu does not drop its little v due to which whenever a linguistic item would be borrowed especially Vs then it will take little v along with it so that the grammatical status of the sentence could be maintained. Similarly, in case of Ns borrowing it was argued that Ns could be borrowed from other languages into Urdu and they could inflect with the morphological aspects of Urdu and does not affect the grammatical status. On the basis of all these, it could be argued that English has rich borrowing capacity as compare with Urdu. Furthermore, it could be argued that the findings of the study would be significant and beneficial for the understanding of the phenomena of borrowing with new dimensions. The findings of the present study could be generalized to all the borrowed Ns and Vs in Urdu and English language.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
