Case Marking in Pashto Nouns: Word and Paradigm Approach

The present study investigates the case marking of nouns in the Marwat dialect of the Pashto language, spoken in many regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan by using the Word-and Paradigm (WP) approach of Haspelmath & Sims (2010). The study attempts to analyze and describe morphological processes of case marking of nouns in the Pashto language. The data was collected from different villages of district Lakki Marwat, located in the south of KPK, in the form of audio recordings of eight willing and preferably old uneducated rural participants. The analysis of the data showed that Pashto nouns shared a number of morphological features with other IA (Indo-Aryan) languages like Rangri vis-à-vis the presence of grammatical gender marking. The data also shows that Pashto nouns are morphologically rich. Nouns carry these case inflections i.e. ergative, nominative, accusative, oblique, and vocative. The study finds the WP approach suitable for the analysis of the morphologically complex Pashto language due to its ability to deal with cumulative, extended, and zero exponents.