A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF VERB MORPHOLOGY IN URDU AND PUNJABI: AGREEMENT AND AUXILIARY SYSTEMS

Abstract

This study examines the verbal morphology of Urdu and Punjabi with a specific focus on agreement and auxiliary systems. The framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993) is employed, which views morphological structures as a realization of abstract morphosyntactic features through post-syntactic operations. The purpose of the study is to identify the similarities and differences in how these features (gender, number, and tense) are morphologically expressed in the two languages. The study uses a dataset of 100 sentences, 50 from each language to represent agreement patterns and auxiliary constructions. The findings suggest that perfective verbs in Urdu agree with the object’s gender and number and use separate auxiliary verbs, while Punjabi shows similar agreement but focuses more on number than gender, and uses fused or merged auxiliaries along with default masculine forms for non-human objects. The study highlights similar structures as well as language-specific differences in the verbal morphology of Urdu and Punjabi.