Doctoral Thesis:

Title: Nominal Features in Hindi Language Acquisition: A Study of Agreement & Modification

Supervisors: Ayesha Kidwai & Sonja Eisenbeiss

My doctoral research investigates the use of overt case morphology and the use of nominal feature agreement in the developing grammar of Hindi speaking children. The former of these includes oblique case morphology on nouns as well as on noun phrase internal constituents, and overt case morphology in the form of postpositions marking syntactic and semantic relations in the verbal and nominal domain. Agreement in nominal features refers to both verbal agreement and noun phrase internal agreement on modifying constituents.

The doctoral research consisted of conceptualising, designing, and execution of experimental stimuli and methods for the elicitation of case and agreement morphology in Hindi language. A rich corpus of primary data was successfully collected using this stimuli from typically growing young participants aged 23-71 months. The research consisted of transcription and analysis of the data, which in turn yielded insights into the developing grammar.

Book Chapter:

To appear Acquisition of Oblique Morphology in Hindi. In The Interplays of Language, Society and Culture: 134-145. Ed. Tariq Khan. Central Institute of Indian Languages & Linguistic Society of India.

Peer Reviewed Conference Proceedings:

2016 Verb Agreement in Hindi and its Acquisition. With Ayesha Kidwai & Sonja Eisenbeiss. In Proceedings of Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages - FASAL 5: 196-215. Eds. Rahul Balusu and Sandhya Sunderasan.

To appear Postpositions & Noun Phrases in Hindi: A view from Acquisition of Agreement. In Proceedings of Linguistic Evidence 2020: Linguistic Theory Enriched by Experimental Data. Eds. Sam Featherston, Robin Hörnig, Andreas Konietzko & Sophie von Wietersheim.

To appear Oblique Case & Concord in Hindi Noun Phrases: Evidence from Language Acquisition. In Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages - (F)ASAL 10.

Manuscripts:

• The use of -ka- and -vaala- in Hindi Noun Modification by Noun

• Spatial Postpositions in Hindi and Dhundari