Problem A

1. Provide an IPA transcription of the third sentence in Section 1 of Milestone 2.

Sentence: You (plural) are from India

IPA Transcription:

2. Based on the data in this section, what is the morphological stem of the verb to be in
Urdu / Hindi?

होना hona is the stem for the verb to be. The base form of the verb gets conjugated
differently depending on situation and then added to the end of the sentence. There
is no way to extract (होना hona) as a stem of the verb to be, as the only forms that
appeared in the data where hε, hɛ̃, hũ, ho. I asked my consultant about what the
base of the word would be.

3. What is the suffix for the 1st person plural? Transcribe your answer phonetically.

Suffix is: हैं, (hɛ) There was no suffix that attaches to the end of a word like there are in
english, however there are words added to the end of a sentence that is inflected based on
case. Hɛ is the version of the word to use in the 1st person plural case.

4. What phonological feature differentiates the singular/plural in the 3rd person?

3rd person pl: ve Bengal se hɛ̃

3rd person singular: vah Bengal se hε

For 3rd person singular, the pronoun as the first word would be vah, whereas in 2rd
person plural the pronoun is ve. In Hindi there seems to be no distinction in the
pronoun between gender, but rather it is inflected in other parts of the sentence. 3rd
person plural also has a nasalized elongated vowel in hɛ̃.

Problem B
1. What is the morpheme that indicates that the action of the verb is ongoing?

Rәh implies that the verb is continuous.

2. How is this morpheme inflected for feminine / masculine subjects?

-a for masculine inflection, -i for feminine, -e for plural

3. If a speaker is male or female, will this change how he or she says "I am X'ing"
where X is any verb? Provide an example that is *not* from the corpus.**
If a statement is both ongoing and the speaker is inflecting for gender, then the
speaker would say: mɛ̃ cillɑ rәh-a hũ : I am screaming(m) or mɛ̃ cillɑ rәh-i hũ : I am
screaming(f)