Himalayan Linguistics

Darai, an Indo-Aryan language of Nepal, displays interactions of person, number, gender, honorifics, and case in its verb agreement system. Darai verbs not only agree with the subject in person, number, gender and case but also with the subject and objects simultaneously in transitive and ditransitive verbs. Moreover, like some other Indo-Aryan languages, such as Maithili (Yadav 1997 [1996]; Yadava 1999), and Rajbanshi (Wilde 2008), Darai shows agreement with the genitive modifier rather than the head noun. Furthermore, the verbs also agree with the dative subject. In addition to the above patterns, verb agreement is complex and is also controlled by the pragmatic status of information. Thus, the selection of agreement markers is triggered not only by certain syntactic constructions but also by pragmatic factors. Darai shares a number of agreement patterns with its Indo-Aryan neighbours, whereas other patterns are specific to Darai. The agreement patterns discussed in this article will be useful in analyses of agreement in other Indo-Aryan languages.