A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF BALOCHI TENSE PHRASES

Abstract

In this study, significant aspect of gap is examined, namely the structure of Balochi tenses, with the help of two tools of generative grammar, namely X-bar Theory and the Minimalist Program. The primary objective is to know the organization of the Tense Phrase (TP) and the Inflection Phrase (IP) (if any) in Balochi sentences and the relation of the tense-marking word or ending with the subject and predicate around it. In order to achieve this, seven sentences were extracted from four published short stories in Balochi language. Every sentence was presented in Roman letters, translated into English and analyzed in order to make the grammar of the sentence easily understandable. The sentences were then represented by tree diagrams, in the common X-bar format, to illustrate the structure of the subject, the predicate and the tense marking element within the clause. There is a very clear and repeated pattern in the sentences. In each instance this word or ending with the tense is at the end of the sentence, consistent with Balochi's word order, Subject-Object-Verb. The tense and agreement are normally expressed on the same word, not on two words: Tense and person of the subject are expressed together, e.g. ent, atan, at and an. Most of the sentences contain a copular verb (be) instead of a lexical one, but there is one example that uses a noun-plus-light-verb form with the ending -tag to indicate past tense on an ordinary verb. One sentence also indicates that the agreement of Balochi verb is with the grammatical subject of the clause, not with any possessor word within the clause, further supporting the notion that the Balochi verb agrees with the grammatical subject of the clause, rather than with any possessor word within the clause. The results here combined give a first formal tree-based picture of the functioning of tense in Balochi, complementing an earlier descriptive analysis of Balochi verbs and agreement. The study is small-scale and only covers the simple past tense and simple present tense in written fiction; conclusions drawn in this study should therefore be regarded as tentative rather than definitive. Despite this, it offers a viable means of describing Balochi TP, and suggests directions for future research, including more dialects, spoken data and more tenses and sentence types.