SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT IN PUNJABI: A MORPHOSYNTACTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The paper evaluates the of subject-verb agreement in Punjabi (one of the Indo-Aryan languages). The study focusses on transitive and intransitive verbs of past, present, future simple and continuous tenses to examine the verb agreement in Punjabi language. The unstructured interview (face to face and video call) has been selected as tool to collect data from Punjabi native speakers. As a theoretical framework, to draw three diagram the X bar theory (Haegeman, 1994) has been used and to examine the verb phrase especially on INFL. The descriptive and exploratory (Creswell, 2014) as research design has been used in the current paper. The results of the paper describe that the transitive and intransitive verbs agree in person. number, tense, gender in present, past and future tenses. And in the case of continuous tenses verbs also agree with subject in terms of number, tense, person and gender. These results indicate that the language is enrich with morphemes in the case of verbs inflection. This study also explores the word order (SOV) of the Punjabi as it is in Sindhi (Cole, 2001; Zahid, 2016) it shows that both languages are sister languages and having syntactically same features well-nigh.