A Comparative Analysis of Pashto and Dari Verbs

Abstract

The paper presents the comparative analysis of the systems of verbs used in the two major Indo-Iranian languages and official languages of Afghanistan: Dari and Pashto. The comparison is made on the basis of the examination of different aspects of the verbal system such as verb conjugation, T-A-M systems, agreement forms, and syntactic properties of verbs in the languages. For this purpose, the paper presents the results of the analysis of the material taken from 30 texts written in Dari and Pashto (15 texts per language). It has been found out that Dari makes use of nominative-accusative alignment and rather simple forms of conjugation based on suffixes, while in the verbal paradigm of Pashto, there can be identified features typical for split ergativity, complex stem changes and pronominal clitics used especially in past tenses. Differently from Dari, aspectual distinction in Pashto is marked via the use of prefixes and auxiliaries; auxiliary verbs are used to form tense and aspect forms in Dari. In addition, syntactically there are differences concerning agreement forms (ergative agreement vs. subject-verb agreement).