Revisiting Morphological Ergativity... Vol. 8 (2014), 1 3 RESEARCH ________ REVISITING MORPHOLOGICAL ERGATIVITY IN HINDI- URDU Usha Udaar, Gurmeet Kaur, Pritha Chandra Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India Summary: This paper is an attempt to understand Hindi-Urdu morphological ergativity from a new perspective. We critically assess the existing ergativity analyses for Hindi-Urdu, with the main focus on light verb constructions. Our main contentions are: (i) transitivity of the lexical verb or that of the light verb does not determine ergative case marking on the subject and (ii) ergative subject constructions do not have underlying control representa- tions. Our account gives a phase-based derivational approach to ergative as an inherent case. 1. Introduction Mcgregor [2009: 480] understands morphological ergativity as a kind of pat- terning in which the Agent is case-marked differently from an Actor and Un- dergoer, which are case-marked identically. In more precise terms, the agent or the transitive subject appears with a case marker different from the case marker on the intransitive subject (Actor) and the transitive object (Undergoer). While such systems are called ergative-absolutive, those systems where the agents and the actors are case marked similarly are called nominative-accusative. A sche- matic representation is given below, see tab. 1: Tab. 1. A schematic representation of nominative and ergative systems Nominative system Ergative system A Ergative Nominative S Absolutive Accusative O [cf. Dixon 1994]