Urdu Correlatives: Theoretical and Computational Issues

The inclusion of South Asian languages in multilingual grammar development projects that were initially based on European languages has resulted in a number of interesting extensions to those projects. Butt and King (2002) report on the inclusion of Urdu in the Parallel Grammar Project (ParGram; Butt et al. 1999, 2002) with respect to case and complex predicates. In this paper, we focus on a possible integration of correlatives into the computational analysis. Hindi/Urdu correlative clauses have received various analyses in the past that treat them as distinct from other strategies of relativization. We follow Bhatt (1997) in arguing that the syntax and semantics of single-headed correlative clauses strongly resemble those of free relative clauses in European languages, but analyze these as specifiers of a DP, rather than as an adjunct.