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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2018

An attempt to understand the encoding of reduced transitivity in Hindi: the case of compound verbs with jānā

From the book Trends in Hindi Linguistics

  • Andrea Drocco

Abstract

Since the 1960s, significant attention has been paid to the categorization and development of the so-called New Indo-Aryan ‘compound verbs’, albeit to different degrees in different languages. Thanks to the work of several scholars, we possess numerous investigations into the phenomenon, especially in respect to Hindi. Many analyses have been devoted to the semantic contrast between simple and compound verbal constructions. However, it is surprising that no significant investigations into the semantic contrast between the use of different vector verbs with the same polar verb have been published. This is especially true of those polar transitive verbs which can be compounded with both transitive and intransitive vectors; for example, khā lenā and khā jānā. The primary aim of the paper is to discuss the factors involved in this choice and, more particularly, whether these factors are semantic or pragmatic. The analysis is synchronic and grounded in a corpus-based examples taken from modern Hindi sources. It focuses on the polar transitive verbs khānā and pīnā compounded with the intransitive vector jānā.

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
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