Reply to Saksena: Further reflections on verb agreement in Hindi

✍ Scribed by COMRIE, BERNARD

• Book ID: 111941294
• Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 711 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0024-3949
• DOI: 10.1515/ling.1985.23.1.143

✦ Synopsis

Saksena (this issue) fails to respond to the challenges offered in Comrie (1984), in particular the call to view Hindi verb agreement against the background of a general linguistic approach to verb agreement, and thereby threatens to disrupt the fruitful interplay between work on Hindi and general linguistic theory.

When two authors engage in a controversy from radically different standpoints, there is a danger that their arguments will largely pass each other by and soon lose the interest of spectators, even of those who are in principle interested in the domain where the controversy originally arose. In this brief reply, therefore, I will attempt to state the main differences between Saksena's standpoint and my own, as I see them, and hope that readers of Linguistics will then make their own decision as to which line of argumentation they find most fruitful. I have divided my further reflections into two sections: descriptive and explanatory.