Descriptive analysis of verbs in Malto (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
Malto is a North Dravidian language spoken in Eastern India. It is an agglutinating language with SOV word order and suffixing morphology. The finite verb word in Malto maximally carries information about valence adjusting operations, tense-aspect-mood, negation and gender-number-person agreement with the subject. The non-finite verbs take suffixes marking adverbialisation, complementation, relativisation, participialisation and relative tense. Syntactically, there is only one finite verb in a sentence and all the other verbs preceding it are non-finite. This paper is a descriptive analysis of the structure of Malto verbs and an outcome of a language documentation project with the intention of describing the formal structure of the Suariya Pahariya variety of Malto. This work is a follow up on grammatical accounts on Malto by Doerse (1884), Das (1973) and Mahapatra (1979).
Examining The Syntactic Alternations Of Hindi Verbs With Reference To Morphological Paradigm
2014
Computational Paninian Grammar framework (PG) has been successfully applied to modern Indian languages earlier, using which anusaaraka machine translation system has been built (Narayana, 1994). In this paper, we show that PG can also be applied to English resulting in an elegant computational grammar. First, we generalize the notion of vibhakti to include position of the word in a sentence along with its case and associated preposition, if any. This allows us to use the familiar PG notions of karaka chart, karaka chart transformation, and sharing rules (Bharati et al., 1995) to account for the English actives and passives, lexical control, infinitives, etc. A transformation of the karaka chart and the vibhakti therein, very naturally accounts for what is called movement. Second, we introduce a new vibhakti called TOPIC position (which corresponds to the first position in a clause) and a new operation called join for connecting a relative clause to its head. These two together handl...
GRAMMATICALIZATION OF VERBS IN DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES
Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions" (Hopper & Traugott 2003:1). To put it differently, grammaticalization is the process in which a lexical word or a word cluster loses some or all of its lexical meaning and starts to fulfil a more grammatical function. During the process of grammaticalization, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, prepositions, postpostions, inflections, derivative affixes, complementizes, coordinators and sentence connectives. Grammaticalization of verbs in Dravidian languages occurs in all the grammatical categories. Verbs in Dravidian languages are grammaticalized into auxiliary verbs, verbalizers, adjectivalizers, adverbilalizers, complementizer and prepositions.
Verb Morphology and Clause Structure in Malayalam
Fabric of Indian Linguistics ( A Festschrift in honour of Udaya Narayana Singh), (Eds.) Shailendra Kumar Singh, Abhishek Kumar Kashyap, Badaplin War, Saralin A Lyngdoh and Barika Khyriem. New Delhi: Lakshi Publishers and Distributors. , 2017
Where have all the verbs gone? On verb stretching and semi-words in Indo-Aryan Palula
Himalayan Linguistics Journal, 2010
The prevalence of complex predicates consisting of a verb component (verbalizer) and a non-verb component (host) is well-known from descriptions of languages in large parts of West and South Asia. Looking particularly at data from the hitherto less-studied Indo-Aryan Palula (Chitral Valley, Pakistan), we will explore their position within the total verb lexicon. Instead of regarding the verbalizers and hosts as building blocks that due to their respective properties license particular argument structures, as has been done in some previous descriptions, I propose that it is the construction as a whole, and its semantics, that assigns case and selects arguments. Rather than seeing a strict dichotomy between verbalizers (also called “light verbs”) used in complex predicates and the corresponding simple verbs, a few highly generic verbs (BECOME, DO, GIVE) seem to be exposed to a high degree of “stretching”. As such they stand as syntactic models – basic argument templates (BAT) – when forming novel complexes, sometimes involving host elements that lack a lexical identity of their own (hence semi-words) in the language as of today.