Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN (Dec 2015)
Some Functional Speech Features of Inflective Patterns of Plural in the Pashto Language
Abstract
The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the application of plural nouns in Pashto. It enumerates the means of conveying the plural of nouns and identifies the main patterns of their use. Sentences used as examples contain nouns, which show capability of word change and word formation. Particular attention is paid to the indirect use of the plural to change the meaning of the word. This phenomenon affects both the vocabulary borrowed from other languages and words of native Afghan origin. Apart from that there are examples of reduplication and distributive meaning of some nouns. The author offers a detailed picture of ties and subordination between parts of sentence taking into consideration the factors of ergativity and substantivization in creation of new forms as well as meanings for the number of parts of speech. The article includes several conclusions. The first one states that the Pashto language is rich in word-formation with respect to all the parts of a sentence. There is a conception that all the suffixes of plural form of the Pashto noun in their direct function express the meaning of plurality of countable objects. There are only solitary cases of their use with abstract nouns. Analysis of sentences is based on data from the contemporary Afghan media and the sample size exceeds over one hundred newspapers and science-based magazines.
