Bosnian to Urdu: familiar agreement does not guarantee the same controller
A feminine verb form may describe agreement with an object
Bosnian and Urdu both contain gender agreement, but their constructions do not always select the same participant as agreement controller. A Bosnian reader who identifies the subject’s gender through a source participle should not assume that every Urdu feminine ending identifies the actor.
Virk, Humayoun and Ranta illustrate an Urdu transitive perfective sentence about a boy buying a book. In their ne-marked example, the feminine agreement follows the direct feminine object, book. The boy remains the buyer. The target ending does not turn him into a female participant.
The Bosnian specification records bio, bila and bilo as masculine, feminine and neuter participial forms. These are useful source clues, but their target correspondence depends on the Urdu predicate. Preserving the source actor can require target agreement that looks different from the Bosnian subject-related ending.
The research paper also contrasts an alternative construction with cukā and subject agreement. Its examples demonstrate why agreement must be evaluated within a complete construction rather than through a rule that every past Urdu sentence always agrees with its object.
Case information can move into a separate postposition
The Urdu resource grammar distinguishes noun morphology from case relations built with postpositions. It identifies ko in dative and accusative constructions, and se in instrumental and ablative constructions. A single visible target postposition can therefore participate in more than one relation.
Bosnian distinguishes these roles through its own case paradigms and associated constructions. A source instrumental does not license interpreting every Urdu se phrase as an instrument: it may instead express origin or another construction-specific relationship. Similarly, a ko phrase must be understood through its relation to the predicate.
If the source identifies an actor, a recipient and an item, retain all three roles even when the target rearranges them. A Bosnian case ending and an Urdu postposition need not occupy corresponding word positions. Their usefulness lies in recovering the participants’ relationships, not maintaining a visual parallel between the noun phrases.
Auxiliary-looking verbs do not always describe another event
The Urdu UD documentation identifies rah in progressive constructions and jā with a perfective participle in passives. A component whose lexical meaning is stay or go can therefore contribute grammatical meaning rather than describe somebody remaining in place or physically departing.
For a Bosnian source describing work in progress, a target progressive construction should retain the ongoing viewpoint. Translating its rah component back as a separate stay event would introduce an activity the source did not assert. The main predicate and auxiliary must be interpreted together.
Likewise, an Urdu passive can describe an action undergone by an item without asserting movement. The source actor may be absent or expressed elsewhere, and target agreement must be assessed within that passive construction. This direction combines two kinds of familiar-looking complexity: gender agreement and multiword predicates. Both languages have them, but Urdu can assign their components different functions. Preserve the Bosnian event and participant roles while allowing the target construction to choose its own agreement controller and grammatical auxiliaries.
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