Major Problems of Dari Speakers in Mastering Pashto Morphology.

This is a contrastive analysis of Dari and Pashto, both official languages of Afghanistan, with a view toward outlining the difficulties faced by speakers of Dari learning Pashto as a second language. The main focus is on morphological structures, although phonology is also briefly dealt with. The brief phonological comparison, with emphasis on a Dari speaker's difficulties in learning Pashto phonology, is followed by chapters describing Pashto and Dari morphology. A detailed analysis is made of difficulties encountered by the Dari speaker in learning Pashto morphology. The major difficulties are divided into the following areas: (1) number, gender, and case in parts of speech other than the verb; (2) the verbal system; (3) agreement, involving number, gender, case, and the verbal system; (4) order, only as it affects phrase constructions; and (5) the noun. (Author/AM)