Pashto Syntax

Yukki Baldoria, Keitaro Mitsuhashi, Rin Tsujita

International Christian University

1 Introduction
Pashto is an Indo-European language that is classified into the East-Iranian branch. The estimated
number of speakers is 49,600,000 according to (Eberhard et al., 2021). This paper focuses on the
Northeast dialect which is spoken in Pakistan and provides brief explanations about the syntax of the
dialect. The basic order of Pashto is SOV as explained in Section 2. Section 3 describes interrogative
sentences. In wh-questions, wh-phrases appear in-situ, and no intonation rise while yes-no questions are
marked by it. The last section focuses on negation and complex sentences. Both types show the
movement of heads or phrases. Even though the basic order of sentences is SOV, complex sentences
have SVO order to prevent two verbs from being next to each other.

2 Basic Word Ordering

This section will briefly summarize the basic word ordering of Pashto grammar. David & Brugman
(2014) described that Pashto word order is head-final, that is, the complementizer mostly precedes the
head of a phrase. This goes for both noun phrases and verb phrases.
First, for determiner phrases (noun phrase)the head noun is placed at the phrase final position. The
modifiers are not allowed to follow the head noun with the exception of the postpositional phrase. The
basic word ordering for the noun phrase is determiner, numeral, adjective, noun, and postpositional
phrase, as shown in (1a). However, note that the ordering of the modifiers are flexible, that is, the
determiner phrase allows them to be scrambled as long as they do not violate the following restrictions:
the modifiers except for postpositional phrase must precede the noun, and the demonstrative cannot
follow the adjective unless the emphasis is on the adjective. (1b) and (1c) is the possible alternative word
order of (1a).

(1) a. da dwa χat kitabuna meɾumano baɾake

Det. Num. Adj. Noun. Noun. PP.
these two big books guests about
‘These two big books about guests’

b. da χat dwa kitabuna meɾumano baɾake

Det. Adj. Num. Noun. Noun. PP.
these big two books guests about

c. dwa da χat kitabuna meɾumano baɾake

Num. Det. Adj. Noun. Noun. PP.
two these big books guests about

The verb phrase is also head-final We could observe this head-final structure from a simple sentence in
(2), where the adverb modifying the verb precedes the head verb. In (2), the head verb is in the phrase
final position of the object DP.

(2) də buti ʃaː ta jo peɾe pətde

Det. Noun. PP. Det. Noun. Verb.
a tree behind the ghost hiding
‘It is behind the tree that the ghost is hiding’

Given the phrase word order, we can put these two phrase structures together, which gives us simple
declarative sentences in (3).

© 2021 Yukki Baldoria, Keitaro Mitsuhashi, Rin Tsujita 99

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Baldoria, Mitsuhashi, Tsujita Pashto Syntax

(3) Lakka mudam perian βini

Lakka always ghost seeing
‘Lakka is always seeing ghosts.’

The Pashto grammar has the SOV (subject, object, verb) structure. The below is the syntax tree for
(3), which assumes that the object DP perian is a complement of VP.

(4)

3 Interrogative Sentences
Declarative and interrogative sentences have the same word order in Pashto. Yes-no questions are
formed with rising intonation whereas wh-questions utilize wh-phrases to compose interrogative
sentences.

3.1 Yes/No Questions When yes-no interrogative sentences are produced, the pitch track is raised
toward the sentence fina, as shown in (5)l8.

(5) a. haʁa japane dei

he Japanse be
‘He is Japanese.’

b. haʁa japane dei ↗

he Japanese be (with rising intonation)
‘Is he Japanese?’

3.2 Wh-questions When wh-questions are formed, wh-phrases appear in-situ. Interrogative sentences
with what, where, and how are shown in the following subsection.

3.2.1 What [sə] ‘what’ usually appears with [siz] ‘thing’ in interrogative sentences.

(6) a. da tika di
this grilled meat be
‘This is chicken.’

8
na ya ‘or not’ is added at a sentence-final position in a casual text-based conversation to make it clear whether
sentences are interrogative or not.

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b. da sə siz dei?
this what thing be
‘What is this?’

3.2.2 Where The question to ask where has the form h [kom zigi] ‘which place.’

(7) a. taso də kom zigi ie

you particle which place be
‘Where are you from?'

[də] is a particle that represents a relationship between an object and a particular word, such as a noun,
in the sentence (David & Brugman, 2014). The function of the particle is similar to the determiner or
possessive in English. In (7), it functions as a possessive marker that connects you and place. Therefore,
the literal meaning of the sentences is ‘Which place do you belong to?’

3.2.3 How

(8) a. da də sumra baja da

this particle how much price be?
‘How much is it?’

When the amount of money is asked, in addition to ‘how much price’, the particle [də] is also used to
show the relationship between this and price. The literal meaning of the sentence is ‘what is the price
that belongs to this?’.
From (6) and (7), it is shown that in Pashto, when creating an interrogative sentence for how and
where, the interrogative word is placed before the object. In addition, the particle [də] is required before
the interrogative word.

4 Negation
Negation is formed in Pashto by the insertion of the negative particle na before the verb. This is
supported by previous research as seen in David and Brugman (2014) as well as elicited data from our
consultant. Thus, as Pashto is an SOV language, this means that the negation will always follow the
object. In terms of the tree diagram, we can look at the following sentence (9) for further clarification.

(9) a. wos haʁa nor peɾian na βini

now she more ghosts neg. see
‘Now she doesn’t see ghosts anymore.’

According to the research in Rivero (1991), Long Head Movement (LHM) in English-type languages
does not see negation c-command Tense and that either the verb or auxiliary head moves into the negative
head under the negative phrase, become one complex unit, and then continue LHM until the reaches the
complementizer head. With this in mind, we can therefore expect the verb to move under each head,
forming a complex unit as it moves towards the complementizer head with the negation and the Tense
marker. However, as the root of verb for [βini] ‘see’ is unclear, the whole word has been included at the
verb, but keep in mind that the Tense marker is under the Tense head and that the verb obtains tense after
being negated and not before. The syntax tree illustrating (9) and LHM is represented in (10).

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(10)

5 Complex Clauses
The complex clauses in Pashto are formed by having the embedded clause move to the spec of CP1
to avoid the double verb formation. As already mentioned, Pashto is an SOV language, which means that
the verb comes last. However, in complex sentences like that of (11a), this becomes problematic as the
two verbs end up next to each other, as seen in *(11b).

(11) a. dʒon χia wo tʃe mariam də buti ʃa. ta peɾe olido

John think past that Mariam possesive tree back behind ghost saw
‘John thought that Mariam saw a ghost behind a tree.’

b. dʒon tʃe mariam də buti ʃa ta peɾe olido χial wo

John. that Mariam possesive tree back behind ghost saw think past
Intended: ‘John thought that Mariam saw a ghost behind a tree.’

Thus, in order to avoid this formation, the embedded clause is moved to the spec of CP1, rendering an
SVO structure in the main clause of complex structures while the embedded clause retains the SOV
formation. The tree (12) shows the movement of (11a).

(12)

Additionally, we must also assume that Pashto has two types of CP, one that has the alignment on the
left and the other where it is on the right. These two forms are illustrated in (13). Through these two
forms, we can explain how complex sentences are formed in Pashto.

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(13) a. b.

6 Conclusion
The above sections have described the syntactic grammar of Pashto. Section 2 first introduces the
basic word ordering in Pashto, that is, the head-final phrasal structure and the SOV structure of the
declarative sentences. Followingly, Section 3 describes the interrogative sentences, which are yes-no
questions (section 3.1) and wh-questions (Section 3.2). Then, Section 4 explains the negation in Pashto,
where the negative marker na is inserted before the verb. Lastly, Section 5 summarizes the formation of
complex clauses. Although the description summarizes some of the basic word-ordering rules, in order
to analyze further, we need to collect more data.

7 References
David, A. B., & Brugman, C. M. (2014). Descriptive grammar of Pashto and its dialects. De Gruyter Mouton.
Eberhard, D. M., Simons, G. F., & Fenning, C. D. (Eds.). (2021) Wthnologue (24th ed.).
http://www.ethnologue.com
Rivero, M. L. (1991). Long head movement and nagation: Serbo-Croatian vs. Slovak and Czech. The Linguistic
Review 8, 319-351.

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