Gawarbati is spoken in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Photo: Abdullah Soan

Abstact:

Gawarbati is an under-described Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. The aim of my PhD project is to describe the morphosyntax of Gawarbati on the basis of a spoken corpus. 

In this talk, I will focus on the work that has already been done and the challenges that need to be solved in the future. Specifically, in the first part of the talk I will present the two chapters written so far, ”Word classes” and ”Simple clauses”. 

In the second part of the talk, I will focus on selected topics in the Gawarbati grammar that I find interesting, though not always clear, and that are to be dealt with in the chapters not yet written. For example, I will discuss restrictions on case agreement in noun phrases, the dative marking of ”when”-clauses, and the interaction of information structure and word order.

The planned format of the thesis is a monograph. 

On Anastasia Panova