DefinePK

Abstract

 The syntactic structure of Urdu, a widely spoken Indo-Aryan language of South Asia, presents a critical area of detailed investigation. While millions of speakers rely on this language for everyday communication, several key syntactic phenomena, particularly the structure of complements and their identification, remains complex and has been underserved by rigorous analysis within formal generative frameworks. This study aims to systematically identify and categorize the Urdu complements, employing the Government Binding (GB) framework. The analysis seeks to utilize X-Bar theory to syntactically analyze the distinctive features of complements and establish clear criteria for distinguishing them from adjuncts. The major findings of this study are that complements can be detected by reordering. They cannot be extra-posed because their extra-posing results in ungrammaticality of the whole construction. Moreover, they occupy different configurational positions in a phrase marker. Complements are located near the lexical head and are sisters to the head and daughters of a single bar level. Further, it is found that the transitive verbs have direct objects as their complements, whereas di-transitive verbs need two objects to complement their meaning. This study is significant as it provides new insight into the structure of the Urdu complements and also provides criteria for their syntactical identification within a structure.