Structure of Verbs in Malto

Abstract

Malto is a North Dravidian language spoken in Eastern India. It is an agglutinating language with SOV word order and suffixing morphology. The finite verb word in Malto maximally carries information about valence adjusting operations, tense-aspect-mood, negation and gender-number-person agreement with the subject. The non-finite verbs take suffixes marking adverbialisation, complementation, relativisation, participialisation and relative tense. Syntactically, there is only one finite verb in a sentence and all the other verbs preceding it are non-finite. This paper is a descriptive analysis of the structure of Malto verbs and an outcome of a language documentation project with the intention of describing the formal structure of the Suariya Pahariya variety of Malto. This work is a follow up on grammatical accounts on Malto by Doerse (1884), Das (1973) and Mahapatra (1979).