Core and Periphery in Saraiki Verbal Morphology: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The article discusses a morphological analysis of verb patterns in Saraiki, an under-resourced yet significant Northwestern Indo-Aryan language. This study is important because understanding Saraiki's verbal morphology not only helps fill a crucial gap in linguistic study but also provides the basis for developing language technology for millions of its speakers. The study aims to investigate the formal and functional characteristics of Saraiki verbs to support language classification and morphological theory. It relies on a dataset of 552 verb tokens manually annotated and coded from a specially compiled, multi-genre corpus. The quantitative analysis distinguishes 40 morphological patterns and shows that more than 81% of the verbs are inflectional. The data reveal a Zipfian distribution, with a few highly productive core suffixes at the head of a long tail of low-frequency forms, and both inflectional and derivational complexities are evident. The suffix -وݨ /-w-ṉ/ is highlighted among the others for its polyfunctionality, serving as both the derivational causative and the inflectional purposive participle, thereby questioning the traditional binary classification of inflection and derivation in morphology. The study also reports a diachronic change, the neutralization of gender agreement in plurals, which signals the process of morphological simplification as one of the characteristics of the language. The implications of these findings are significant, as they provide the linguistic community with extensive empirical data on Saraiki verbal morphology and are thus valuable for the development of natural language processing applications.