The Morphological Realization of Tense, Aspect and Mood in Gaddi

Abstract

One of the most remarkable features of India is its linguistic diversity. Withover a billion speakers, India is home to various magnificent tongues thatare a representative ofthe six major language families of the world. One such tongue is Gaddi. It is primarily spoken in the state of Himachal Pradesh, at the foothills of the majestic Himalayas. The goal of this paper is to present the verbal inflection system of Gaddi.

All the data presented in this paper have been collected as part of fieldwork conducted in Palampur, India.Verbal inflection in Gaddi is predominantly marked for the categories of tense, aspect and mood. Since the association of agreement with these categories is very significant in the language, it shall be one of the key areas that this papers attempts to illuminate. A feature-based approach is adopted to present the data. Hence tense, aspect, mood and agreement are presented as features that the verbs in the language inflect for with various values.