Dogri to Basque: a recipient can also change the auxiliary
Gi identifies a recipient in the Dogri transfer example
Sawhney’s Dogri example of giving a book includes a giver marked with ne, a recipient marked with gi and a feminine singular book reflected in the perfect form. Laka’s Basque grammar shows another way to encode a transfer: a dative recipient is marked in the noun phrase and also reflected in the auxiliary. A translator should therefore not regard auxiliary changes as a second transfer or an extra participant.
In an original scenario where one person gives a book to another, preserve three roles: giver, recipient and book. The Basque auxiliary can carry information about those roles even when the Dogri source expresses some of it through separate postpositions and a different agreement pattern. Correctly identifying the recipient noun is necessary, but it is not the whole target construction.
An added recipient does not automatically change the basic auxiliary family
Laka contrasts an appearing event with a seeing event and then adds a dative participant to each. The auxiliaries change form to reflect that participant, while the basic distinction between the two auxiliary patterns remains. This demonstrates that recipient or experiencer agreement and auxiliary selection are related but separate issues. A new dative form need not mean that an intransitive event has become an ordinary transitive action.
This matters when a Dogri account first describes an object appearing to somebody and then somebody handing that object to them. The same person can occupy a dative-like role in both target descriptions, but the two events have different argument structures. Do not make the first event a transfer just because its Basque auxiliary contains information about a person. Nor should the second lose its giver because an earlier clause had only an appearing entity and an experiencer.
Shared ergative terminology does not make agreement identical
The Dogri example has ergative-marked Ram and a verb agreeing with the feminine book. Laka explains that Basque auxiliaries can reflect absolutive, ergative and dative phrases. These descriptions concern different agreement systems. Copying the source verb’s feminine value cannot choose a Basque auxiliary paradigm, and recognizing ne as an ergative marker does not determine every target agreement component.
For a Dogri sequence contrasting I gave you the book with you gave me the book, the same item remains involved while giver and recipient reverse. The Basque auxiliary must track that reversal together with the noun phrases. An unchanged book noun alone cannot establish that the transfer has been translated correctly. Conversely, overt personal pronouns need not appear merely to reproduce a word count if their reference is appropriately expressed in the target construction. Follow each participant’s case and role through the clause, then select the matching auxiliary. The result preserves the Dogri exchange without pretending that the languages package personal reference in the same places.
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