Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics: 2012 9783110279757, 9783110279498

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Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2012

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 246

Editor

Volker Gast Founding Editor

Werner Winter Editorial Board

Walter Bisang Hans Henrich Hock Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume

Hans Henrich Hock

De Gruyter Mouton

Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2012

edited by

Rajendra Singh Shishir Bhattacharja

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-027949-8 e-ISBN 978-3-11-027975-7 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen 앝 Printed on acid-free paper 앪 Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents

Rajendra Singh (1943-2012) .............................................................................................. ix In Memoriam Hans Henrich Hock

xxvii

General Contributions

Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangla: A biaxial approach Probal Dasgupta The re-emergence of finite serial verbs in South Dravidian Gail Coelho

3

45

Special Contribution

The terrified tiger that used to laugh at the school: Three alternations in Bengali .............................................................................................. 79 Shishir Bhattacharya

Regional Report

Linguistics in Nepal (2005-2011) .................................................................................. 93 Yogendra P. Yadava

vi Contents

Reviews Tariq Rahman - From Hindi to Urdu: A social and political history by Rama Kant Agnihotri

109

Tej K. Bhatia and Kazuhiko Machida -The oldest grammar of Hindustani: Content, communication and colonial legacy (Vol!, 2 and3) ........................................................................................................................ 117 by Ghanshyam Sharma

Appendices

Announcements: The Gyandeep prize/Housekeeping

125

Notes on contributors ........................................................................................................... 127

Editorial preface Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (ARSALL) is devoted to bringing out what is currently being explored in South Asian linguistics and in the study of South Asian languages in general. South Asia is home tu a wide variety oflanguages, structurally and typologically quite diverse, and has often served as a catalyst and testing ground for theories of various kinds. Although linguists working on South Asia have made significant contributions tu our understanding of language, society, and language in society, and their numbers have grown considerably in the recent past, until recently there was no internationally recognized forum for the exchange of ideas amongst them or for the articulation of new ideas and approaches grounded in the study of South Asian languages. The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics, of which this annual is a direct descendant, played that role during the last decade, but in 2007 we decided to go a bit further and incorporate a slightly modified form of such a forum into Trends in Linguistics. This is the sixth issue of ARSALL as part of the series Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs. Each volume of this annual review generally has five major sections:

i. General Contributions, consisting of selected open submissions that focus on important themes and provide various viewpoints. ii. Special Contributions, consisting of generally invited single or multiple contributions on important issues, ranging from the narrowly grammatical to the wide-scope socio-linguistic/socio-political. When many contributions are included, the section will in effect constitute a mini-symposium, albeit in the written form, on the issue chosen for a given year. It will serve the function of familiarizing the reader with current thinking on issues seen as salient in the study of South Asian languages. iii. Reports, consisting of reports from around the world on research on South Asian languages. iv. Reviews and Abstracts, consisting of reviews of important books and monographs and abstracts of doctoral theses.

viii Editorial Preface

v. Dialogue, consisting of a forum for the discussion of earlier work, preferably previously published in this annual, comments, reports on research activities, and conference announcements. Other than excellence and non-isolationism, ARSALL has no theoretical agenda and no thematic priorities. The first, general section of this, the sixth issue of ARSALL contains two contributions: Dasgupta's Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangia: A biaxial approach and Gail Coelho's The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian. In the Special contribution section Bhattachatja compares different models of phonology in the light of Bengali data in order to show which model offers the best account of the phonology of a language. As Nepal is one of the major centets for the study of South Asian languages, we thought it was appropriate to have our Regional Reports section publish a report on recent Nepalese research on South Asian languages in this issue of ARSALL. We regret that the present issue of ARSALL has no Dialogue section. The Review section contains two reviews: i) Tariq Rahman's book on the social and political history of Hindi and Urdu, and ii) Tej K. Bhatia and Kazuhiko Machida's three volumes book on the oldest grammar of Hindustani written in Dutch by J. J. Ketelaar- a German from Elbing (Poland) towards the end of the 17th century. We are grateful to Prof. Hans Henrich Hock, Mr. Wolfgang Konwitschny, Ghanshyam Sharma and Mujib Rahman for their help and support in the preparation of this issue. ARSALL 2012 is the last edited work by Professor Rajendra Singh who asked me to coedit this volume a couple of months before he succumbed to cancer, on the 24th of August in Montreal at the age of sixty-nine. This volume is dedicated to his memory - to his excellence as a lingnist, as a teacher, as an editor, and above all, to his utmost care for his friends, students and colleagues. Shishir Bhattacharja

RAJENDRA SINGH

(1943--2012) One of the important practitioners in Theoretical linguistics, Professor Rajendra Singh passed away on the 24111 ofAugust at Saint Mary's Hospital in Montreal at the age of sixty-nine. He was born in Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, India. He did his undergraduate studies in Banaras and graduated

from Agra University.

x

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A Ph.D. from Brown, Professor Singh had a style of his own in whatever he undertook: teaching, editing, writing, asking genuine questions about language and linguistics, fmding possible answers to those questions, and even in socializing with others. From him we got two falsifiable theories of grammar, one in the domain of phonology, Generative Phonotactics, and the other, Whole Word Morphology, a model of word formation which he had constructed together with his almost life-time friend and colleague Alan Ford. He had a sort of disdain regarding the current practice of Socio-linguistics, a reason for writing his Lectures against Sociolinguistics where he said clearly what a genuine sociolinguisic research should look like. Exclusively Popperian in his method of research, Singh's stand as linguist was unbiased, non-partisan to the extent that he was always ready to throw away his own theories had they failed in explaining linguistic realities of any human language. As a teacher at the University of Montreal (since 1972), in Mysore, Vienna, Paris, Udaypur or elsewhere, his method of teaching linguistics was Socratic in the sense that he used not to give answers to his pupils, his trick was to teach them how to ask right questions. 'The good thing about Noam', he once said, 'is that he always asks right questions', by which Singh must have meant that many among us tend to ask wrong questions and pretend to give right answers. Rajendra Singh had no intention to retire from his duties, neither was he ready to expire so untimely. He continued to correct the texts of the present volume in his death bed, found discrepancies, proposed corrections and asked in writing to prepare a copy as neat as possible.We will continue to remember the linguist he was for the excellence, variety and volume of his work, and also, the man he was for his pleasant company around a cafe regulier or a chilled beer in his favorite coffee houses: La Brunante or Britlerie Saint Denis in Montreal, or elsewhere. PUBLICATIONS BY RAJENDRA SINGH BOOKS R. K. AGNlliOTRI and R. SINGH (eds.) (2012) Indian English. Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan. SINGH, R. and S. STAROSTA (eds.) (2003) Explorations in Seamless Morphology. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

List ofpublications

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DASGUPTA, P., A. FORD and R SINGH {2001) After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics. Berlin: Lincom. SINGH, R. (ed.) (1998) Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives. Thousand Oaks: Sage SINGH, R (ed.) (1997) Grammar, Language and Society: Contemporary Indian contributions to the study oflanguage. New Delhi: Sage. FORD, A., SINGH, R. and G. MARTOHARDJONO {1997) Pace Panini: Towards Word-Based Theory ofMorphology. New York: Peter Lang. SINGH, R. and R. K. AGNlliOTRI {1997) Modern Hindi Morphology. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. SINGH, R. (1996) Lectures Against Sociolinguistics. New York: Peter Lang. SINGH, R. (ed.) (1996) Trubetzkoy 's Orphan. Amsterdam: Benjamins. SINGH, R. (ed.) (1996) Toward a Critical Sociolinguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. SINGH, R (1995) Linguistic Theory, Language Contact and Modern Hindustani. New York: Peter Lang. SINGH, R. et al. ( 1995) Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics. Thousand Oaks: Sage. SINGH, R. (ed.) (1994) Translation: A View from the Outside. Numero special, META.39.2. SINGH, R. (1991) Explorations in Interlanguage. Delhi: Bahri. LELE, J.K. and SINGH, R. (1989) Language and Society: Steps Towards an Integrated Theory. Leiden: Brill. SINGH, R. et al. (eds.) (1988) Modern Studies in Sanskrit-f. Delhi: Bahri. SINGH, R (1982) Jaishankar Prasad: Poet and Playwright. Boston: G. K. Hall.

ARTICLES SINGH, R. (2007) Unsafe at Any Speed? Some Unfinished Reflections on the 'Cultural Turn' in Translation Studies. In P. Saint-Pierre and P. C. Kar (eds.) Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, 7386. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. SINGH, R (2007) Linguistic Knowledge and Multilinguality. In B. Choksi and C. Natarajan (eds.) The Episteme Reviews, 63-78. New Delhi: MacMillan.

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SINGH, R. (2005) Reduplication in Modern Hindi and the Theory of Reduplication. In B. Hurch (eds.) Studies in Reduplication, 263-282. Berlin: Mouton. R.Singh, J.K.Lele and G.Martohardjono (2005) Communication in a Multilingual Society. In S.F.Kieslingand C.B. Paulston (eds.) Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings, 45-57. Oxford: Blackwell. SINGH, R. and S. Neuvel (2003) When the whole is smaller than the sum of its parts: The case of morphology. Chicago Linguistics Society Proceedings 38. SINGH, R. (2002) A Note on the Morphology of Indian English. The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics. 269-274 SINGH, R. (2001) Constraints, Preferences, and Context-sensitivity in Morphology. InK. Dziubalska, (ed.) Constraints and Preferences, 339358. Berlin: Mouton. NEUVEL, S. and R. SINGH (2001) Vive Ia difference: What morphology is really about. Folia Linguistica 35 (3/4): 314-320. SINGH, R. (2001) Morphological Diversity and Morphological Borrowing in South Asia. In P. Bhaskararao and K. V. Subbarao (guest eds.) The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics-2001: 305-320. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (2000) In Praise of Sakatyayan: Some Remarks on Whole Word Morphology. The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics-2000: 303-312. SINGH, R. and A. BACKUS (2000) Code-Mixing and Bilingual Proficiency. The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics- 2000: 61-92. SINGH, R. and P. DASGUPTA (1999) On So-called Compounds. The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics-2000: 265-278. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1998) On Bilingual Lexical Access. In P. Bhatt andR. Davis (eds.) The Linguistic Brain, 13-19. Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press. SINGH, R. (1998) On Neologistic Jargon Aphasia. In P. Bhatt and R. Davis (eds.) The Linguistic Brain, 247-251. Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press. SINGH, R. (1998) Reflections on Morphology and the Lexicon. In B.Vijayanarayan and C. Ramarao (eds.) Word Formation in Indian Languages, 1-9. Hyderabad: Centre for Advanced Study in Linguistics, Osmania University. SINGH, R. (1996) Explorations in Phonology and Morphology. In S.K. Verma (ed.) In Memory ofR.N. Srivastava, 123-141. Delhi: Kalinga.

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xiii

SINGH, R. (1996) Some Unfinished Reflections on Naturalness. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49 (3): 246--248. SINGH, R. (1996) Naturalness, antithesis, and Autopoiesis: Comments on Ronneberger-Sibold. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49 (3): 264--266. SINGH, R. (1996) Natural Phono(morpho)logy: A View from the Outside. In B. Hurch and R. Rhodes (eds.) Natural Phonology: The State of the Art 1-38. Mouton: Berlin. SINGH, R. (1995) Rethinking the Relationship between Phonology and Loan Phonology.Folia Linguistica 29 (3-4): 395--405. SINGH, R. and D. PARKINSON (1995). L-1, L-2, and Intermorphology. Rivista di Linguistica 7(2): 369-389. SINGH, R. and P. MUYSKEN (1995) Wanted: A Debate in Pidgin and Creole Phonology. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 10(1): 157-169. SINGH, R. (1994) Generative Theory, Language Contact, and Modern Hindustani: Two Sides of a Linguistic Story. Rivista di Linguistica 6 (I): 19-37. SINGH, R. (1994) Indian English: Some Conceptual Issues. In R. K. Agnihotri and A. L. KHANNA (eds.) Sociocultural and Linguistic Aspects ofEnglish in India, 369-381.Delhi: Sage. SINGH, R. (1993) La sociolinguistique: Quelques conclusions, pour commencer. Revue Quebecoise de Linguistique (Nutnt!ro special: La Sociolinguistique) 22 (2): 172-76. LELE, J.K. and R. SINGH (1993). Modernizing Intellectuals or Commuters between Cultures: A Reexamination of 'Tradition' and 'Modernity'. In C.S. Bhat (ed.) Sociology of Development and Change, 322-349. New Delhi: Orient Longman. SINGH, R. (1993). Reflections on Interlanguage: Some remarks on Interlanguage and Linguistic Theory. In B. Ketternann and W. Wieden (eds.) L2 Acquisition Research: Selected Papers from the Inaugural Coriference of the European Second Language Association, 9-28. Salzburg 1991: 9-28. Tiibingen: Gunter Narr. SINGH, R. (1992). American Sociolinguistics and South Asia. South Asia Language Review 2 (2): 1-15. SINGH, R. and I. MAZURKEWICH (1992). Code Switching: An Annotated Select Bibliography. Indian Journal ofApplied Linguistics 23: 92-127. SINGH, R. (1992) Against Silence: Reflections on Critical Theory and Ordinary Language. In A. Clas (eds.) Word, Words, Witty Words, Le Mot,

xiv Rajendra Singh (1943-2012)

Les Mots, Les Bons mots, 251-257. Montreal: University of Montreal Press. SINGH, R. (1992). Steps Away from an Indian Ethnoscience. Contributions to Indian Sociology 26 (1): 143-149. SINGH, R. (1992). Two Morphological Notes. Revue Quebecoise de Linguistique 21(2): 183-194. MARTOHARDJONO, G. and R. SINGH (1992). Integral Listing and Speech Errors. Linguistische Berichte 139: 153-168. FORD, A. And R. SINGH (1991) Propo!deutique Morphologique. Folia Linguistica 25 (3-4): 549-575. LELE, J.K. and R. SINGH (1991) And Never the Twain Shall Meet: Language and Politics chez Chomsky. Journal of Pragmatics 15 (2): 175-194. SINGH, R. (1991) V ers une theorie integree de la Phonologie et de Ia Morphologie. Revue Quebecoise de Linguistique (Numero special: Lingnistique au Quebec) 20 (2): 73-91. SINGH, R. and J.K. LELE (1991) Language, Power, and Cross-sex Communication Strategies in Hindi and Indian English Revisited. Language in Society 19 (4): 541-546. SINGH, R. (1991) Interference and Contemporary Phonological Theory. LanguageLearning41 (2): 157-175. SINGH, R. (1990) Repair Strategies and Constraints. The Linguistic Review 6(2): 161-167. SINGH, R. (1990) Do we Really Want a Syntax Organ. Indian Linguistics 49 (1988): 109-115. SINGH, R. (1990) Plato, Kant, Durkheim, and the People of Tasmania: The Device 'Phonological Rule' and Interphonology. In J. Leather and A. James (eds.) New Sounds 90: 130-137. Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam. SINGH, R. (1990) Vers une theorie Phonotactique Generative. Revue Quebecoise de Linguistique.19 (I): 131-163. SINGH, R. (1990) South Asian English and American Interactional Sociolingnistics. In P.H. Nelde (eds.) Conflict: 175-183. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1989) A closer look at so-called variable processes. In R. Fasold and D. Schiffrin (eds.) Language History and Variation, 367-380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. SINGH, R. (1989) The Modem Insights of Ancient Grammarians. Indian Linguistics 50: 156-162.

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SINGH, R. (1988) Natural Phonology and Well-formedness Conditions. In W. Dressler et al. (eds.) Discussion Papers from Phonologica 1988, 67-70. Vienna. SINGH, R. (1988). How to Live with External Evidence in Phonology. The Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 33 (4): 423-429. SINGH, R. (1988) In defense of External Evidence, The Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 33 (4): 329-343. SINGH, R. (ed.) (1988) Linguistic Theory and External Evidence. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics 33 (special issue). SINGH, R. and G. MARTOHARDJONO (1988) lntermorphology and Morphological theory. In W. O'Neil and S. Flynn (eds.), Linguistic Theory and Second Language Acquisition, 362-383. Dordrecht: Kluwer. SINGH, R., J. LELE and G. MARTOHARDJONO (1988) Communication in a Multilingual Society: Some Missed Opportunities. Language in Society 17 (1): 43-59. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1987) Interphonology and phonological theory. In A. James and J. Leather (eds.) Sound Pattern in Second Language Acquisition 163-173. Dordrecht: Foris. SINGH, R. and J.K. LELE (1987) Conversations with a Door-Mat.Economic and Political Weekly 22 (27): 1093-96. SINGH, R. (1987) Well-formedness Conditions and Phonological Theory.ln W. Dressler (ed.) Phonologica 1984: 273-285. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SINGH, R. (1987) On the redundant nature of variable rules. Acta Linguistica Hqfniensia. Vol. 20: 111-119. SINGH, R. (1987) Constraints on grammars in contact.Jndian Linguistics 47:89-95. LELE, J. and R. SINGH (1987) Language and Literature of Dalits and Saints: Some Missed Opportunities. In I. Narain and Lothar Lutze (eds.) Literature, Social Consciousness and Polity: Papers from the Eighth European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, 28-{)0. Delhi: Manohar Publications. SINGH, R. and B.K. KACHROO (1987) Textual Cohesion in Hindi: A Comparative Study. Review ofApplied Linguistics 76: 1-24. SINGH, R. (1986) On fmding a place for Trubetzkoy's brain-child. Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 31(4): 343-363. SINGH, R. (1986) Immersion: Problems and Principles. The Canadian Modern Language Review 42 (3): 559-571.

xvi Rajendra Singh (1943-2012) DISCIULLO, A.M., P. MlNSKEN and R SINGH (1986) Government and Code-mixing. Journal ofLinguistics 22 (1 ): 1-24. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1985) L'interference et Ia theorie phono1ogique. Lingvisticae Investigationes 9(2): 365-375. SINGH, R (1985) Remarks on Indo-Anglian Literature. In G. Vassanji (ed.)A Meeting ofStreams, 27-33.Toronto: University of Toronto. SINGH, R. (1985) Prosodic adaptation in interphono1ogy. Lingua 67: 269282. SINGH, R. (1985) On Denying a Reasonable Request in Hindi: A Study in Comparative Sociolinguistics. Review ofApplied Linguistics 66: 79--89. SINGH, R. (1985) Modern Hindustani and formal and social aspects of language contact. Review ofApplied Linguistics 70: 33-{iO. SINGH, R. (1985) Grammatical constraints on code-mixing: Evidence from Hindi-English. Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 30 (1 ): 33-46. SINGH, R. (1985) Andaza Bayan: A Note on Mitigating Denials in Hindi and English. Hindi Samvad3/1:14-16. SINGH, R and J.K. LELE (1985) Remarks on Marathi and Language Contact. In P.H. Nelde (ed.) Methoden der Kontaklinguistik, 269--75. Bonn: Dummler. SINGH, R and G. MARTOHARDJONO (1985) Review Article. J. Gumperz, Discourse Strategies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 6(2): 193-199. FORD, A. and R. SINGH (1985) Towards a non-paradigmatic morphology. In M. Niepokuj et al. (eds.) Berkeley Linguistics Society Proceedings 11: 87-95. Berkeley: University of California. PIGGOTT, G. and R SINGH (1985) The phonology of epenthetic segments. Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 30 (4): 415-451. SINGH, R. (1984) Sociolinguistic Opacity and South-Asians in Canada. The Toronto South-Asian Review 3/1: 60-{i2. SINGH, R (1984) Explorations in the Ethnography of Discourse. In V.S. Pendakur (ed.) South Asian Horizons, 2: 35-41. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1984) Interference, Overgeneralization, Adaptive Rules and Phonological Theory. In G. Nathan (ed.) The Uses of Phonology, 114-121. Carbondale: Southern illinois University. SINGH, R and G. MARTOHARDJONO (1984) Review Article. J. Gumperz (ed.) Language and Social Identity. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 29 (2): 217-225.

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AHMED, M., R. ANDERSON, S. CURRY and R. SINGH (1984) The Apples are Coming: The transfer of Microcomputer Technology and Metatechnology to Developing Nations. In V.S. Pendakur (ed.) South Asian Horizons 2: 13-26.Vancouver: University of British Columbia. FORD, A. and R. SINGH (1984) Remarks on the directionality of wordformation processes. In G. Alvarez and al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference On Linguistics 1984: 205-213. Columbus: Ohio State University. PIGGOTI, G. and R. SINGH (1984) The Empty Node in Phonology: An Analysis of Epenthesis, McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 1(2): 64-109. SINGH, R. (1983) We, They, and Us: A Note on Code-Switching and Social Stratification in North India. Language in Society 12: 71-73. SINGH, R., A. D'ANGLEJAN and S. CARROLL (1983) Elicitation of InterEnglish. Language Learning 32 (2): 271-288. FORD, A. and R. SINGH (1983) Remarques sur Ia directionnalite des processus de formation de mot. Revue de /'Association Quebecoise de Linguistique 3: 41-50. FORD, A., SINGH, R. (1983) Onthe statos of morphophonology. In J. Richardson et a!. (eds.) Chicago Linguistics Society Proceedings 13: The Interplay of Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, 63-78. Chicago: University of Chicago. SINGH, R. (1982) Some Redundant Compounds in Modem Hindi. Lingua 56: 345-351. SINGH, R. (1982) The English Prefix in-Revisited. Recherches linguistiques a Montrea/18: 193-197. SINGH, R. and M. KULLY (1982) Nativization and German-IEREN. The Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 27(1): 55-58. SINGH, R. and J. STANTON (1982) Cohesion and Social Stratification, Review ofApplied Linguistics 56: 1-10. SINGH, R. (1981) Grammatical Constraints on Code-Mixing. Recherches linguistiques a Montrea/17: 155-163. SINGH, R. (1981) Where Variables Ru1es Fail: Variably Deleted Consonants Revisited. Recherches linguistiques aMontrea/17: 149-153. SINGH, R. (1981) The English Plural. Recherches linguistiques aMontreal 17: 145-148. SINGH, R. (1981) The English Negative Prefix-in. Recherches linguistiques a Montrea/17: 138--143.

xviii Rajendra Singh (1943-2012) SINGH, R. (1981) Latin Samprasarana, The Feature+ Syllabic and MetricalPhonology, Recherches linguistiques Montrea/17: 135-138. SINGH, R. (1981) In Defense of the Universal Syllabic Template. Recherches linguistiques Montrea/17: 119---133. SINGH, R. (1981) May Be: Indeterminacy in First and Second Language. International Review ofApplied Linguistics XIX: 147-151. SINGH, R. (1980) Modem Hindi be- A Category-changing Prefix. Papers in Linguistics, 13(4): 797-799. SINGH, R. (1980) Old French Consonant Epenthesis and Syllable Structure, Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 25: 226--230. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1980) Flexion, derivation and Panini. In K. Koerner (ed.) Amsterdam Studies on the Theory and History ofLinguistic Science 20:323-332. FORD, A. and R. SINGH (1980) L'importance theorique de Ia linguistique appliquee. In Nickel and Nehls (eds.) International Review of Applied Linguistics, special issue on Models of Grammar, 64--76. Heidelberg: Julius Gross. SINGH, R. (1979) Modem Hindi and the Direct Discourse Hypothesis. Gaveshana 32: 89-92. SINGH, R. and S. CARROLL (1979) L-1, L-2, L-3. The Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics 5: 51---63. SINGH, R. (1978) Hindi: Comp-lnitial or Comp-Final. Recherches linguistiques a Montrea/9: 203-209. SINGH, R. (1978) In Defence ofpolysemy. Linguistics 213: 78-84. SINGH, R. and A. FORD (1978) On Non-Nominal Anaphora. Recherches linguistiques Montrea/11: 227-234. CONNORS, K., N. MENARD and R. SINGH (1978) Testing Linguistic and Functional Competence in Immersion Programs. Actes du 4' Congres de /'Association de linguistique du Canada et des Etats-Unis, 154--164. SINGH, R. (1977) Diglossamania and Second Language Learning. Language Sciences 48: 23-25. SINGH, R. (1977) Supra-syntactic Interference. Review ofApplied Linguistics 37:92-97. SINGH, R. (1977) The Last Straw: A Note on Complementizer Substitution. Recherches linguistiques Montrea/8: 137-140. SINGH, R. (1977) Theoretical and Pedagogical Implications of MultiDirectional Contrastiver Syntax, Plurilinguisme a l'Universite. Cahiers de /Tnstitut des langues vivantes 26: 731-739.

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List ofpublications xix SINGH, Rand P. MAHONY (1975) The interpretation of Dreams, Semiology, and Chomsk:yan Linguistics, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 30: 221-242. SINGH, R. (1973) A Note on Multiple Negatives. American Speech: 45(3): 247-251. SINGH, R. (1973) A Note on Lexical Homophony. Glossa: 7(1): 97-103. SINGH, R. (1973) Multiple Negation in Shakespeare. Journal of English Linguistics 7: 50-56. (reprinted in Salmon, V. and E. Burness (1987) Reader in the language of Shakespearean drama, 339-345. Amsterdam: Benjamins. SINGH, R. (1973) The Case of the Interrogative: Some Implications for Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. In Nilsen (ed.) Meaning: A Common Ground ofLinguistics and Literature, 278-283. SINGH, R. (1972) Syntactic Interference: A Case Study. In Hays and Lance (eds.) Sound-Stream to Discourse, 214-223. Columbia, Missouri. REVIEWS SINGH, R. (1999) Review of E. Kahr, Indian Semantic Analysis. Anthropological Linguistics. SINGH, R. (1994). Review of Aronoff, Morphology Now. Studies in Second Language Acquisitionl6:3. IKOME, 0. and R. SINGH (1993). Review ofW. Nemser and W. Wieden, The Pronunciation of English in Austria. CJL 38(1): 113-121. SINGH, R. (1991) Review of K. Koerner, Practicing Linguistic Historiography, CJL 36 (4): 424-428. SINGH, R. (1991) Review of K. Janicki, Toward Non-essentialist Sociolinguistics, CJL 36 (2): 205-209. SINGH, R. (1990) Review ofJ. Staal, Universals, CJLIRLC 35(1): 110-114. SINGH, R (1988) Review of T.K. Bhatia, The Hindustani Grammatical Tradition. CJL/RLC: 298-302. SINGH, R. (1988) Review ofP. Sells, Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories. Bulletin de l'ACLAX, April1988. SINGH, R. (1987) Review of Aronoff et a!. (eds.) Language SoundStructure. CJVRCL32 (4): 423-25. SINGH, R. (1987). Review of Rutherford, Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition. Bulletin de l'ACLAIX, 1: 124-125. SINGH, R. (1984) Review of Ohala, Aspects of Hindi Phonology. The Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 29 (2): 225-226.

xx Rajendra Singh (1943-2012)

SINGH, R. (1984) Review of J.K. LELE. Elite Pluralism and Class Ru1e. The Indian Sociological Bulletin 32 (1): 81-82. SINGH, R. (1981) Review of John Lyons. Language Meaning and Context. The Canadian Journal ofLinguistics 28: 1. SINGH, R. (1981) Review ofC.E. Snow and C.A. Ferguson (eds.) Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisiton. Bulletin de l'ACLA 3: 1. Montreal: ACLA. SINGH, R. (1981) Review of H. Giles (ed.) Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations. Bulletin de l'ACLA 3: 1. Montreal, ACLA. SINGH, R (1981) Review of G. Cannon. An Integrated Transfonnational Grammar of the English Language. Bulletin de l'ACLA 3: 1. Montreal: ACLA. SINGH, R. (1981) Review of G. Sampson, Liberty and Language. Harvard Educational Review 51: 3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. SINGH, R. (1977) Review of Leech and Svartvik. A communicative Grammar of English TESL Communique, vol. 2(2): 5. SINGH, R. (1976) Review ofS. Cowasjee, Goodbye to Elsa. The Journal of Indian Writing in English 4: 78-80. SINGH, R. (1974) Review ofR. DiPietro. Language Structures in Contrast. Linguistics 1963: 103-107. SINGH, R. (1974) Review of G. Nickel (ed.) Papers in Contrastive Linguistics. Lingua 33: 69-77. SINGH, R (1973) Review of R. Huddleston. The Sentence in Written English. Foundations ofLanguage 9: 406-409. SINGH, R. (1971). Review of Indian Writing in English. Books Abroad, 561-562. PRESENTATIONS Chasing Butterflies and Looking for Sociolinguistics in South Asia. Plenary lecture, SALA, Universitat Konstanz, Germany (October 9, 2001 ). Whole Word Morphology and South Asianists. SALA, Universitat Konstanz, Germany (October 2001). Remarks on Whole Word Morphology (with apologies to Panini). Invited lecture, Faculty ofLetters, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan, Apri123, 2001. South Asians in North America. Invited lecture, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. April19, 2001. Whole Word Morphology. Invited lecture. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan. April 11, 2001.

List ofpublications

xxi

Grounding Linguistics in Multilingualism. Invited lecture. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan. Aprill2, 2001. Chasing Butterflies in a Multilingual Garden, The R.N. Srivastava Memorial Lecture, University of Delhi, January 2001. Competence and Capacity, Distinguished Lecture, The University of Hyderabad, India, March 2000. Linguistic Aspects of Multilingualism, Invited Lecture, Babel, K.U.B. Tilburg, the Netherlands, May 2000. Aspects of Whole Word Morphology, a set of invited lectures (3), The University of Hawaii, Honolulu, August 2000. Morphological Diversity and Morphological Borrowing in South Asia. Invited paper at the Tokyo Symposium on Typology, Contact, and Convergence in South Asia, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, December 1999. India's Immanent Critique of Panini and its Descriptive Implications. Plenary lecture, SALA IX, York University, York, England, July 1998. Compounding in Hindi and Bangia. Paper read at GLOW. January 1998, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad (with P. Dasgupta). Zero in Morphology. The International Symposium on Null Elements, The University of Delhi, January 1997. Towards a Word-based Approach to Morphological Typology: An lllustration. Paper presented at the Symposisum on Natural Theory, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia, May, 1996. Discourse Strategies or Strategic Discourse? Plenary lecture, Symposisum on Discourse, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, May 8-10, 1996. Modualrity and Morphology. Invited Paper at the Indian Congress on Logic, Language, and Semiotics, Mysore (CIIL), India, Jan. 11-16, 1996. Some Conceptual Issues in the Study of Asian Englishes. Pan-Asiatic Symposium, Bangkok, Jan. 8-10, 1996. Reflections on Interlanguage. Invited plenary talk at EUROSLA 1991, Salzberg, Austria, September 19--21, 1991. Applications of Statistics to Language-Structure: A Linguist's Point of View. Invited lecture at the Third Canadian Conference in Applied Statistics, Concordia University, Montreal, May 1991. Rethinking the Relationship Between Phonology and Loan Phonology. CLA Annual Meeting, Kingston, Ontario, May 1991.

xxii Rajendra Singh (1943-2012)

Secularism, Pluralism, and Other Objects of Wonder. Invited lecture, International Symposium on Religions Pluralism in Secular India, Lucknow, India, December 28-30, 1990. Reflections on Ordinary Language Philosophy and Critical Theory. Invited paper for the International Symposium on Western and Non-Western Theories of Meaning. The University of Delhi, January 4-7. 1990. Natural Phonomorphology: A View from the Outside. Plenary Lecture, International Workshop on Natural Phonology, Bern, Switzerland. September 18-21, 1990. Interphonology and the Device 'Phonological Rule'. Sounds 90, Symposium, Amsterdam, April 1990. Ou Neologistic Jargon Aphasia (Invited discussant). The Linguistic Brain Symposium, University of Toronto, February 1990. On Bilingnal Lexical Access, (Invited discussant). The linguistics Brain Symposium, University of Toronto, February 1990 (with A. Ford). Interference and Contemporary Phonological Theory. Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Meeting, Laval, May 1989. Sociolinguistic Variables: Dependant or Autonomous International Symposium on Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Variability. University of Delhi, February 1989. Natural Phonology and well-formedness Conditions. Phonologica 1988, Krems, Austria. Phonology, Morphophonology, Morphology and the Autonomy Thesis. Phonologica 1988. Krems, Austria. Conversations with a Door-Mat: Language, Power, and Cross-Sex Communication. South Asian Languages Round-Table, Cornell University, June 1987. Putting the Cart before the Horse: Remarks on American Interactional Sociolinguistics. South Asian Languages Round-Table, Cornell University, June 1987 (with G. Martohardjono). Inter-morphology and Morphological Theory: A Plea for a Concession. M.I.T. Symposium on Linguistic Theory and Second Language Acquisition, October 1985. Towards a Non-paradigmatic Morphology. BLS XI, Berkeley, February 1985 (with A. Ford). Marathi and Language Contact. International Symposium on Language Contact and Conflict, Brussels, August 1984 (with J. Lele).

List ofpublications

xxiii

Linguistic Processes and Bilingualism. Invited address. The 8"' Symposium on Spanish and Portugese Bilingualism. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, November 1984. Panini, Language Theories and the Dialectics of Grammar. Third Int'1 Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (Princeton), August 1984 (with J. Lele). Remarks on the Directionality ofWord-formation Processes. ESCOL, Ohio State University, September 1984 (with A. Ford). Formal and Social Aspects of Hindi as a Contact-Language. Invited lecture, the Hindi Literary Society of Canada, June 1984. Communication and Society: Some Missed Opportunities. AILA (Bruxelles). August 1984 (with J. Lele). Well-Formedness Conditions and Phonological Theory (invited speaker). Fifth Int'l Conference on Phonology, Vienna, June 1984). Languages in Contact and Grammatical Theory (guest speaker). Symposium on Bilingualism (SUNY, Buffalo), October 1983. Language and Literature of Dalits and Saints: Some Missed Opportunities Eight European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (Tallberg), July 1983 (with J. Lele). Perspectives nouvelles en phonologie. Seminaire du Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier COte-des-Neiges (Montreal), June 1983 (with G. Piggott). The Apples are coming. CASA (Vancouver), June 1983 (with Ahmed, Anderson and Curry). Explorations in the Ethnography of Discourse. CASA (Vancouver), June 1983. On Allegro Ru1es. CLA (Vancouver), May 1983. The Empty Node in Phonology: An Analysis of Epenthesis. ACL (Vancouver), May 1983 (with G. Piggott). Remarks on the directionality of word formation process. Annual Congress of AQL (Trois-Rivieres), May 1983 (with A. Ford). On the Status of Morpho-phonology, 1983. Parasession of the Chicago Linguistics Society (Chicago), April 1983 (with A. Ford). Interference, Overgeneralization, Adaptive Ru1es and Phonological Theory. Conference on the Uses of Phonology (Carbondale, Ill.), February 1983 (with A. Ford). A Closer Look at Some So-Called Variable Processes. Ulh Annual Colloquium on New Ways on Analyzing Variation etc. (Washington), October 1982 (with A. Ford).

xxiv Rajendra Singh (1943-2012)

Phonological Constraints in Hindi. 4"' South Asian Languages Round-table (Syracuse), May 1982. South Asians in Canada: Obiter Dicta. Seminar on South Asians in Canada: Problems and Potentials, McGill, Montreal, March 1982. Reflections on Language Variability. Invited speaker, University ofPune, India, January 1982. Declustering of Consonantal Clusters in English Loans in Indic Languages. Third International Conference on South Asian Languages and Linguistics (Mysore, India), January 1982. Panini and the Grammatical Tradition of India. CASA (Halifax), May 1981. Textual Cohesion in Hindi. 3"' SALR (Stony Brook), May 1981 (with B. Kachroo). Code-Mixing and Government. CLA (Halifax), May 1981 (with A.M. DiSciullo and P. Muysken). Free at last. Canadian Linguistics Association, CLA, (Halifax), May 1981. Syllables in Interphonology. Conference on Language Development, University of Boston, October 1980. In defense of the Universal Syllabic Template. Canadian Association of Linguistics, Montreal, May 1980. We, They, and Us: Code-Switching and Social Stratification in NorthIndia. Canadian Association of South Asian Studies, Montreal, May 1980. Aspects of Language Borrowing: English Loans in Hindi. International Symposium on Languages in Contact and in Conflict, Brussels, June 1979. How to Say 'No' in Hindi. Canadian Association of South-Asian Studies, University ofSas., Saskatoon, May 1979. Inflexion, Derivation and Panini. The First International Congress on the History of Linguistic Sciences, University of Ottawa, August 1978 (with A. Ford). Inflexion, Derivation and Panini. The First International Congress of Applied Linguistics, Montreal, August 1978 (with A. Ford). La linguistique appliquee comme mesure d'evaluation. Le 5th Congres international de linguistique appliquee, Montreal, August 1978 (with A. Ford). Aspects ofNon-Native English. The Second Language Development Conference, Boston University, Boston, October 1977 (with A. D' Anglejan). Testing Linguistic and Functional Competence in hnmersion. The Fourth LACUS Forum. Montreal, August 1977 (avec K. Connors and N. Menard).

List ofpublications

xxv

Complementizers and Languages in Transition. Linguistic Society of America, Honolulu, August 1977. Linguistic Deviance and Analytic Discourse. Lecture, The Psycho-Analytic Society of Canada, Montreal, January 1976. Theoretical and Pedagogical Implications of Multi-Directional Contrastive Syntax. Conference on Multilingualism in the University, Catholic University, Louvain, Nov. 1975. Criteria of Acceptability. Lecture, University of Delhi, July 1975. A Phonological Hierarchy in Indic. Lecture, Brown University, March 1975. Polysemy vs. Homonymy. North-East Modem Language Association, Montreal, Aprill975. Competence, Performance, and Second Language errors. Le 5th International Colloquium of AlMAV, Bruxelles, August 1973. The Case of the Interrogative: Some Implications for Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. Conference on Meaning: A Common Ground of Linguistics and Literature, University ofNorthem Iowa, April1973. Empirical Foundations of Contrastive Studies. The Third International Congress of Applied Linguistics. Copenhagen, August 1972. Syntactic Interference: A Case Study. The First Mid-America Linguistics Conference, University of Missouri, Columbia, Nov. 1971. Scientific English. The 2nd North-East Linguistics Society Conference, University ofMassachussetts, Amherst, Nov. 1967. EDITED JOURNALS 2006--2012 Annual Review ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton 2003-2005 The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton 1999-2002 The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Linguistics. Thousand Oaks: Sage (This list is incomplete) S.B.

In Memoriam Hans Henrich Hock

Rajendra Singh's battle with cancer, which ended on 24 August 2012, took away from us a major scholar of general linguistics, especially in the area of South Asia. Rajendra joined the faculty at the Universite de Montreal in 1972, right after receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University. Invited for numerous visiting professorships at institutions such as the University of British Columbia, the University of Chicago, the National University of Singapore, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Universitlit Potsdam, he maintained his permanent affiliation with the Universite de Montreal, becoming Professeur Titulaire (Full Professor) in 1984. In addition tu teaching courses in Historical Linguistics, Mmphology, Phonology, and Sociolinguistics he supervised ten Ph.D. dissertations and an equal number of MA theses, served on all major committees, and organized guest lecture series and a 1983 Workshop on Three-Dimensional Phonology. My first contact with him took place early in both of our careers, in one of his first publications, an edited volume Modern Studies in Sanskrit. Later meetings, especially at South Asian linguistics conferences, offered the opportunity to get to know him more personally - as a person who loved linguistics, loved to argue vigorously, and yet remained open to different views and maintained friendly relations with those who might vigorously argue back. These qualities were especially helpful when he began his service to South Asian linguistics as editor of a series of publications, first called The Yearbook of South Asian Linguistics (1999-2011 with Sage, 2003-2005 with Mouton de Gruyter) and more recently Annual Review ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics (2006 to 20011, Mouton de Gruyter). The series has been making a tremendously important contribution to South Asian linguistics, especially by the breadth of different perspectives presented in its pages, ranging from historical linguistics and language contact to sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, as well as all aspects of linguistic theory.

xxviii Hans Henrich Hock Rajendra clearly had his own preferences, but this did not influence his editorial decisions. It is unfortunate that he passed on just at the crucial moment when, after extensive conversations between Mouton and Rajendra, the decision had been reached to convert the series to a freestanding journal. Beyond his editorial activities, Rajendra made major scholarly contributions of his own, especially in the areas of sociolinguistics/Indian English and morphology. In the process he established a highly impressive reuvre - seventeen monographs and edited volumes, not counting the twelve issues of the Yearbook/Annual Review, over I 00 journal papers and articles in edited volumes, and some 25 reviews. His often critical work on sociolinguistics and Indian English began with the 1995 publication, Explorations in Indian Sociolinguistics (Sage), and continued with Lectures against Sociolinguistics (1996, Peter Lang), the edited volume Toward a Critical Sociolinguistics, and has culminated with the co-edited volume Indian English: Towards a New Paradigm (2012, Orient Black Swan). In the area of morphology, Rajendra argued against root-and-affix-based approaches- going back as far as Pal)iniand advocated instead a whole-word based morphology. Important coauthored contributions in this are Modem Hindi Morphology (1997, Motilal Banarsidass), Pace Panini: Towards a Word-Based Theory of Morphology (1997, Peter Lang), After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics (2001, Lincom), and Explorations in Seamless Morphology (2003, Sage), as well as a large amount of papers and articles. Last, but not least, Rajendra served the South Asian linguistics community through his participation on international planning conunittees for conferences on South Asian languages and linguistics, especially the South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtables, even for the last installment (2011, Mysore) when his health was seriously deteriorating. Rajendra's passing deprives us of one of the most active and influential contributors to our field. We can only hope that a new generation of linguists will build on his foundations and enrich South Asian linguistics with similar vigor and dedication.

General Contributions

Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangia: A biaxial approach

Probal Dasgupta

Suniti Kumar Chatte7ji 's pioneering descriptions of V V 'compound verbs' (his Bangia term was jougik kriya, Chattopadhyay 1972: 136--8) and N VI A VIP V 'composite verbs' (SOngjogmulok kriya, Chattopadhyay 1972: 131-2) sometimes glossed over the distinction, preferring to use 'compound verbs' as a cover term (Chatte7ji 1926: 1049-1052). The leading idea ofhis research programme involved regarding bilexemic verbs, whatever their first constituent, as semantically comparable to monolexemic verbs. The point was to ask just how a concrete bilexemic combination employs its lexical resources to produce some particular semantic effect, and to track these patterns diachronically. That framework and its twenty-first century successors are ill-equipped to ask why bilexemic verbs can harbour bound words (like Ter or jigeS or hediye or paRano, words occurring only in Ter pawa 'to notice', jigeS kOra 'to ask', hediyejawa 'to be bored to death', ghum paRano 'to put to sleep') when infinitival plus modal sequences, for instance, cannot. When we try to state the non-versatility of bound words carefUlly, we arrive at a take on these structures that can keep faith both with generativist considerations and with the lexical integrity issue that underlay Chatte7ji 's proposals. 1. Introduction

One goal of this study is to improve our understanding of collocations and especially idioms in a generative context, focusing on verb-headed constructions in Bangia (a.k.a. Bengali); this goal has to do with the encoding of a community's common sense in the form of its language, and with the traffic of arbitrariness and conventionality in linguistic structures. We distinguish this traffic from formal issues of compositionality and opacity, formal properties that have to do with assembly and do not help characterize how a speech community deploys its language as a specific resource and how the cognitive life of individual speakers features lexical and phrasal material.

4 Probal Dasgupta

Our second goal is to elaborate the principles of biaxial syntax, the syntactic module of a substantivist description, in the context of re-examining V V compound verbs and NV/ A V/ P V (hereinafter "XV'') composite verbs in some detail. Substantivist linguistics is committed to the task of characterizing the social and mental interfaces where linguistic reality meets other objects of study; biaxial syntax seeks to reconcile this architectonic commitment with the specific demands of syntactic material. The study is organized as follows. Section I reviews earlier work on compound and composite verbs. Section 2 highlights the distribution of bound words and other salient properties of these constructions. Section 3 formulates biaxial syntactic principles and brings them to bear on this material. Section 4 springs an empirical surprise - bipolar compound verbs - and elaborates the theory further to accommodate it. Section 4 also comments on reactive speech, which stretches the capabilities of utterance beyond the sentence grammar and whose effects are to be discounted when delineating the specific contribution of grammatical modules to our understanding of the data. 2. The shelf life of an old question In order to approach the genre of questions concerning Analytic expressions in language A vis-a-vis .synthetic equivalents in language~. it may help if we take a casual look at a new item in this genre, purposely choosing a toy question. Suppose it suddenly dawns on us that French!A tous les deux 'all the two' corresponds to English/~ both. Given all three, all four and their counterparts tous les trois, tous les quatre, we may think that the French/A form tous les deux throws some light on the English/~ word both, and that we know how to pursue 'Project Bothology'. However, once the data base grows to include the ~thetic Hindi-Urdu words donoM, tiinoM, caaroM'both, all three, all four' and the slightly more Analytic Bangia forms duToi, tinTei, carTei 'two.Cla.Emph, three.Cla. Emph, four.Cla.Emph' featuring the general classifier Ta, our enthusiasm about this first draft of project bothology begins to plummet. The contrast between the dissociative emphatic clitic i in Bangia and the universal quantifier tous in French gives pause. So do the puzzling word formation resources Hindi-Urdu draws upon in this domain. Why should hazaaroM in HindiUrdu mean 'thousands' in a hand-waving fashion? Why can it never be contextually stretched to mean 'all one thousand'? Once we are told that for humans Bangia insists on using dujonei, tinjonei, carjonei 'two.Cla. Emph,

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

5

three.Cla.Emph, four.Cla.Emph' with the human classifierjonplus a mysterious vowel e, that does it. We stop holding our breath for illuminating parallels in fourth or fifth languages. We will surely keep finding messy patterns of semi-interpretable opacity, not the neat pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This predicament sends us back to the drawing board; we hope to produce formal hypotheses and bring them to bear on empirical patterns both A and~ in our 'bothological' quest. Hale & Keyser's (2002) work, particularly influential in this domain, proposes that syntactic projections with nodes of the A kind, through movement processes specific to word formation (amenable to recasting, of course, in terms of Internal-Merge or other formalizations), can help make sense of semantically richer~ words. Noting that such a framework will overgenerate word templates, Dasgupta (2006) suggests a way in which intuitions about possible words - especially words in Esperanto recast as a tool of semiotic and semantic inquiry' - can be used as an empirical filter constraining the class of admissible word types. To extend our 2006 proposal to 'bothological' examples, the strategy involves focusing on German compounds based on beide 'both' such as beidiiugig, lit. 'both-eyed',= 'binocular', and beidhiindig, lit. 'both-handed',= 'ambidextrous'. One proceeds to note the lexical unavailability of compounds like *allfiinffingrig 'all-five-fingers-dextrous' (its usability as an on-the-spot nonce formation does not earn it a place in the lexicon of possible words see section 4 for further examples of heavily context- dependent locutions that need not count as licensed by the linguistic system proper). Given that beide lexically blocks *aile zwei in German just as 'both' blocks its fu>nthetic synonym '*all two' in English, we conclude that it is not semantic differences that distinguish well-formed beidhiindig 'ambidextrous' from illformed *all(e)fiiriffingrig 'all-five-fingers-dextrous'; the contrast reflects the fact that beide is a word, while aile fiinf is not. Semantics may well require precisely Hale & Keyser's micro-analysis, but does not suffice. Blocking and other lexical phenomena call for specific measures. We now close the parable, leaving 'bothology' for other linguists to pursue. We propose to devote ourselves, keeping the parable in mind, to the study of Synthetic constructions in another sector - bilexemic verbs, a heuristic cover term2 that subsumes V V 'compound verbs' (P. Dasgupta 1977) and X V 'composite verbs' (M. Dasgupta 1990). In this domain, unsurprisingly, certain linguists have been developing accounts based on Hale & Keyser's proposals, which prompts this study updating our 2006 response to that approach. What we do find surprising is that the study of

6 Probal Dasgupta

bilexemic verbs, often called 'complex predicates' by those authors, should have given a question formulated in 1926 so long a shelf life. To wit, contemporary bilexemic inquiry has steered a course very close to what Suniti Kumar Chatterji's (1926) remarks had suggested as the trajectory to follow. He described Bangia bilexemic verbs as analogous to English verb-particle constructions- "The use of this 'Compound Verb' or 'Group Verb' construction", he wrote, "amply compensates for the loss of the rootmodifying prefixes which form such a characteristic featore of Sanskrit and of Indo-European speeches outside India. In English, the modifying prefix now comes after (e.g., to lie down, to sit down, to put off, to put out)" (Chatterji 1926: 1049). He compared the use ofbilexemics also with aspect marking in Slavic - "These compound verbs [ ... ] are as characteristic of the modern Indo-Aryan speeches as the 'aspects' of the verb in the Slav languages" (1926: 1050). It is striking that Gillian Ramchand's (2008) analysis builds its descriptive base precisely at these three points - English verb-particle constructions, Slavic aspect markers and Indo-Aryan bilexemic verbs' - though her research did not take into account the fact that Chattetji' s iconic book flagged these domains in 1926. The two authors keep the same languages in view and the same questions in mind. Ramchand's book, like Chatteiji's, (a) treats South Asian bilexemic verbs ('complex predicates' in her terminology) as a natural class, underplaying differences between the second, verbal constituent ofV V compound verbs and that of XV composite verbs (we must add that Ramchand has stated [p.c. 2012] that her point was to focus on compound verbs, and that underplaying the contrast with composite verbs was not essential tu her research programme); (b) regards the comparison of these constructions with monolexemic counterpart verbs in the same language or some typologically distinct language as a central task for bilexemic studies; (c) highlights the compound verb subtype as displaying prototypical bilexemic characteristics; and (d) expects a unified account of the semantics covering at least South Asian compound verbs and those designated Germanic and Slavic counterparts Chatterji had listed and Ramchand has examined. 'Bilexemology' has been remarkably coherent. To see how far this coherence extends, consider Chatteiji's friend Rabindranath Tagore - a pioneering and articulate amateur linguist better known as a poet who was awarded the literatore Nobel in 1913. Tagore (1938/1978: 444) also spoke ofV V compounds and XV composites in the same breath and underplaying any contrast between them. Like the other

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

7

authors on our screen, Tagore chose to highlight V V compounds; empirical issues will oblige us to return to his remarks in section 4. Chattetji's apparent abandonment of the superordinate bilexemic verb concept in favour of two distinct classes in his synchronic description of Bangia, V V 'compound verbs' (jougik kriya, Chattopadhyay 1972: 136-8) and X V 'composite verbs' (SOngjogmulok kriya, Chattopadhyay 1972: 131-2), turns out not to represent a major shift. All his writings maintain that bilexemics, whatever their first constituent, are semantically comparable to monolexemics. Just how each bilexemic employs concrete resources to particularize some meaning is amenable to lexicographic inquiry - though Chatterji does think that v, in a v, V2 compound must call the shots. Ramchand moves this inquiry to a formal level enabled by advanced semantic tools. But generative work in this domain did not follow the unchanging path we appear to see when we jump from Chattetji to Ramchand. XV composite verbs, with a few idiomatic exceptions, seem to a generative describer (M. Dasgupta 1990) to start out as light verb plus action-noun-headed sister phrase; through restructuring, this turns into the surface structure we see, headed by a bilexemic that inherits the action noun's arguments. In contrast, the classical generative account of compound verbs (Hook 1974, P. Dasgupta 1977) holds the lexicon, not a transformational derivation, responsible for all V V constructions. Compositionality must be playing markedly different games in composite verbs and in compound verbs for these accounts to have looked valid to the generative eye. Lexical forces, however, act on all bilexemics. Even M. Dasgupta (1990: 3) begins with the point that "a Composite V of[the] type [represented by her (13)-(15)] must have a lexical entry" in contrast to their transformationally derived congeners. Do the lexical entries of V V compound verbs and X V composite verbs have a shared set of 'bilexemic verb' properties meriting independent characterization? Do specifiable factors account for specific characteristics of subtypes? If all bilexemic verbs have certain shared traits, their subtype-specific properties should follow from general principles of grammar. Linguists wishing to take this idea seriously will find what looks like evidence for their view. Observation One, the literature on Hindi-Urdu compound verbs has reported from day one that in the presence of negation they overwhelmingly often drop the second verb and go monolexemic: (1) ilaake ke sab makaan jal jaaeMge, par ye do makaan nahiiMjaleMge area Gen all houses bum go.Fut, but these two houses Neg bum.Fut 'All the houses in the area will bum down, but these two houses won't bum'

8 Probal Dasgupta

In contrast, Bangia freely permits the bilexemic structure even under negation: (2) elakar Somosto baRi puRe jabe, kintu e duTo baRi puRe jabe na area Gen all houses burn go.Fut, but these two houses burn go.Fut Neg 'All the houses in the area will bum down, but these two houses won't bum down'

What might motivate this contrast between the two languages? One could try linking it to the distinct negation mechanisms operative in Bangia and in Hindi-Urdu. Hindi-Urdu differentiates its Neg particles modally, reserving nahiiM for the indicative, na for the subjunctive and mat for the imperative. Negation in Bangia interacts with tense, not mood, deploying nifor the 'past' and naelsewhere (this is an abbreviated statement; both past tense and perfect aspect are involved). Unpacking the connection motivating this conjecture would take us too far afield. The Esperanto grammarian Kalocsay's (1966: 85-7) remarks on the intersection of aktionsart, modality and negation provide one pertinent formulation, whose details we need not buy into. Our point is that the general theory of grammar can handle Observation One in principle. Readers who regard Observation One as an overstatement - and who interpret differently "the empirical fact that the text frequency of compound verbs in Bangia is considerably lower than it is in Hindi-Urdu.? Being less frequent, Bangia's compound verbs are closer to the lexical (vs. grammatical) pole in the spectrum that runs from composite lexical item to grammatical inflection and hence are negated more easily, more like any monolexical verb" (Peter Hook, p.c. 2011; cf. Hook 1993, 1996, 2001) -will still agree that Observation One minus appropriate empirical pruning follows from general principles. Observation Two pertains to defaults vs marked lexical choices. Bangia composite verbs deploy IeOra 'to do' and hOwa 'to be/ become' as default light verbs (see section 2.4); conceivably Hindi-Urdu gives karnaa 'to do' and honaa 'to be' comparable default status. In contrast, no language investigated so far features vector verbs that are demonstrably least specified for all transitive compound verbs or for all intransitive compound verbs. (That "for most intransitive predicates in Hindi-Urdu vector jaanaa GO is the least specified; for transitive predicates denaa GIVE and lenaa TAKE are the least specified.? However, for intransitive predicates expressing sounds uThnaa RISE is the least specified" [Hook, p.c. 2011, cf. Hook 1991] sounds equivalent to our claim that compound verbs feature aktionsart- specific

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

9

least-specified subdefaults, not one default for all transitives or one for all intransitives.) Likewise, the English verb-particle construction favours no default particles (again, aktionsart-specific subdefaults of Hook's kind may exist). Why should this be so? Presumably Observation Two reflects the aktionsart/transitivity contrast. Transitivity and intransitivity can afford default exponents. But aktionsart has no comparable all-weather defaults; hence its differentiated arsenal. Recognizing bilexemic verbs as a natural class is independently helpful in the context of finding a home for items straddling the compound/ composite boundary. Consider the compound verb ghumiye pORa 'sleep.Cj to.fall, to fall asleep'. Its transitive counterpart ghum paRano 'sleep to.opaque. verb4 , to put to sleep' couples the noun ghum 'sleep' with a light verb- an indubitable case of a transitive-intransitive pair sitting on the fence between the two constructions. Less clear are intransitive composite verbs like dhOra pORa 'catch to.fall = to get caught', kaTa pORa 'cut to.fall = to get cut', joRa laga 'together to.fit =(for pieces) to fit back together', paired with such transitive compound verbs as dhore phEla 'catch.Cj to. drop= to catch', keTe phEla 'cut.Cj to.drop =to cut, to slice' ,juRe dewa 'join.Cj to.give =to put (pieces) back together'. For such examples, Dasgupta (1989a: 230-34) proposed that as a matter of lexical idiosyncrasy a compound verb could give its polar constituent a quirky non-conjunctive shape. That proposal appealed to the alternation between the obscure form aTka pORa 'stuck to.fall = to get stuck' and the compound verb aTke pORa 'get.stuck.Cj to. fall= to get stuck', or between the formjoRa laga 'to fit back together' and the compound verb juRe jawa 'fit.Cj to.go = to fit back together'. The 'fall asleep'/ 'put to asleep' alternation, however, clearly exhibits an intransitive composite verb' paired with a transitive compound verb, undermining the proposal that all obscure a-ending forms might be poles endowed with a quirky shape•. Ifbilexemics form a natural class, pairings that straddle the composite/ compound fence stop looking anomalous. To summarize, the idea that bilexemic verbs might form a natural class whose subtypes have specific properties reflecting general principles squares with some of the relevant facts, and is retained as a tentative conjecture for the moment. In section 3 we consider some crucial empirical material; it becomes clear at that stage that the notion of 'bilexemic verbs' or 'complex predicates' is only of heuristic value and does not designate a natural class. The long shelf life of Chatterji's question is surprising insofar as composite and especially compound verbs in South Asian languages, like English

I 0 Probal Dasgupta

verb-particle constructions and Slavic prefixes expressing aktionsart/aspect, display considerable idiomaticity. Neither Chattetji's nor Ramchand's apparatus can address this. An approach that misses such a salient feature can hardly work alone. The present study offers it some company. 3. New questions 3 .I. Cranberry words The first question we take up is new only in the context of the ChattetjiRamchand programme: bound or 'cranberry' words in the sense of Richter & Sailer (2002) and Soehn (2009). M. Dasgupta's study of composite verbs calls them 'unique morphemes'. Her examples (1990: 2-3)- the '(13)-(15)' mentioned in our earlier quotation, uMki mara 'to peep' (mara 'to hit', uMki a unique morpheme), Ter pawa 'to feel, to notice' (pawa 'to get', Ter a unique morpheme), jigeS kOra 'to ask' (kOra 'to do', jigeS a unique morpheme) - were intended to show that some composite verbs were lexically generated rather than transformationally derived. Likewise, cranberry words like the underlined words in hedive jawa 'to be bored to death' and ~jawa 'to go wrong (said of plans)' were cited by P. Dasgupta (1980: 99-101) as evidence for a base-generated V V analysis of the compound verb construction. The phenomenon deserves a fresh look. Enlarging the compound verb data base, we encounter dheve aSa 'to come running', teRe aSa 'to come running aggressively', TeMSe jawa 'to die', tiJJliiJ:.jawa 'to get tired'. As far as we know, a Bangia compound verb allows a cranberry word only as its first constituent, its 'pole', never as its 'vector'. Among composite verbs, though, we find two cranberry 'light verbs': bhalo !uJSJJ. 'to love' (bhalo 'good') andghum pqRano'to put to sleep' (ghum 'sleep'). That kharap baSa'to hate' (kharap 'bad') can be produced and comprehended does not affect baSa' s cranberry status. Were this frequent pun to get bleached into a real-life antonym for 'love', baSa wonld still fail to count as a versatile lexeme. We conclude that we have found two composite verbs with light cranberries. In contrast, compound verbs exhibit no known cranberry vectors in Bangia. However, a thorough search elsewhere has turned up a clear example in Marathi, for which I thank Renuka Ozarkar7 : only yeuN ThepNe 'to suddenly arrive', and less comfortably jaauN ThepNe 'idem' (the main verbs mean 'come' and 'go' respectively), harbour the cranberry ThepNe.

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

11

Are there functionally analogous cranberries in English? One pertinent line of vetse by Robert Bums, sometimes translated as The best-laid schemes of mice and men went oft astray, reads The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley in the original. In non-Scots English astray is a cranberry particle; its bigamous conduct need not lead us to question astray's strict bifidelity to its versatile partners go and lead- in our permissive day and age mere bi-gamy is surely austere. I leave to Slavicists the quest for aktionsart prefix cranberries. Our first new question, then, is: When we tty to describe systematically the cranberry facts in all four positions of the bilexemic verb grid, what do we learn about the ways of compositionality and idiosyncrasy in clause structure? 3.2. Exceptional Vector-Modal hybrids From cranberry words, not an entirely new topic in South Asian bilexemic stodies, we torn to the unexplored interface at which infinitival complement plus modal structures meet the compound verb construction. Does Bangia have modals propet? Well, pare 'can' and cae 'wants' exhibit dual behaviour. When they take a nominal object, they count as fullfledged vetbs and can setve as the pole (contentive V 1) of a compound vetb, as in (4), (6):

(3) oSOb lwj ram emnite pare na those tasks Ram normally can not 'Those tasks Ram ordinarily can't do' (4) kintu ebar ram oi lwjTao pere gElo but this.time Ram that task. even can.Cj went 'But this time Ram even managed that task' (5) jodu emnite pauMruTi cae na Jodu normally bread wants Neg 'Jodu normally doesn't want bread' (6) kintu ebar jodu pauMruTi ceye phello but this.time Jodu bread want.Cj dropped 'But this time Jodu surprisingly asked for bread' In contrast, when they take an infinitival complement, these Bangia vetbs look diminished, and take on some properties of the morphologically identi-

12 Probal Dasgupta fiable modals found in many languages. For instance, (8) and (I 0) suggest that they lose their ability to take a vector: 8 (7) emnite ram aT miniTe Ek mail douRote pare na normally Ram 8 mins I mile run.lnf can Neg 'Normally Ram can't run a mile in eight minutes' (8) ??kintu ebar ram aT miniTe Ek mail douRote pere gEio but this.time Ram 8 mins I mile run.Inf can.Cj went 'But this time Ram managed to run a mile in eight minutes' (9) emnite ram pauMruTi khete cae na normally Ram bread eat.Infwants Neg 'Normally Ram doesn't want to eat bread' (10) *kintu ebar ram pauMruTi khete ceye phello but this.time Ram bread eat.Infwant.Cj dropped 'But this time Ram surprisingly (said he) wanted to eat bread' Leaving the question of why (8) is less drastically ill-formed than (10) for future research, we note that more generally verbs serving as control triggers' in Bangia resist taking vectors, although the same verbs with a regular nominal complement readily accept them; we speak of resistance rather than prohibition to acknowledge heterogeneities like (8) vs (I 0) that await clarification:

(II)jodu aSol kOthaTaprothome bole nilo Jodu main point. Cia first say.Cj took 'Jodu began by making his main point' (12) jodu prothome SEmke boiTa kinte bollo Jodu first Shyam.Obj book.Cia buy.lnfsaid 'At the outset J odu told Shyam to buy the book' (13) *jodu prothome SEmke boiTa kinte bole nilo Jodu first Shyam.Obj book. Cia buy.lnf say.Cj took 'Jodu began by telling Shyam to buy the book' (14) modhu tar agatha krisTigulo bondhuder diye debe kEno? Modhu her Agatha Christies friends.Obj give.Cj give.Fut why 'Why should Modhu give her Agatha Christies away to her friends?'

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

13

(15) modhu e paRae onno Daktarder kaj karte debe kEno? Modhu this area.Loc other doctors.Obj work do.Inf give.Fut why 'Why should Modhu let other doctors work in this area?' (16) *modhu e paRae onno Daktarder kaj korte diye debe kEno? Modhu this area.Loc other doctors.Obj work do.Inf give.Fut not 'Why should Modhu donate to other doctors the chance to work here?' A summary cannot afford to say that control verbs in Bangia resist vectors and are thus monolexemic, for sometimes we encounter control triggers that lack a vector but are composite ergo bilexemic, like ceSTa kOra 'to try'. Sothe short answer is that control verbs in this language are bare poles. Peter Hook informs me he has a published take on why this is so elsewhere in Indic; later studies within our biaxial research thread will take such writings on board. For Bangia we conjecture that control verbs, being bare poles, are in a lexically weak position, and that the weakest of them, the modals, begin to look a little bit like vectors themselves. In this context, we note three properties distinguishing a true polevector compound verb sequence from a sequence consisting of an infinitival and a vector-resisting 'modal'. Property A: the verb on the left in the control construction is infmitive-marked, contrasting with the conjunctive-inflected pole of a compound verb. Property B: the control verb 'tell' of (12) can prepose to focus, stranding the infinitival structure, resulting in (17), in contrast to the vector 'took' of (11), which cannot do this, hence the unacceptability of output (18). Property C: the control verb of (12) can take two coordinated complements, as in (19), while the vector of (11) cannot, see (20): (17) jodu prothome b61lo SEmke boiTa kinte Jodu first said Shyam.Obj book.Cla buy.Inf 'At the outset Jodu told Shyam to buy the book' (18) *jodu nflo aSol kOthaTa prothome bole Jodu took main point.Cla first say.Cj 'Jodu began by making his main point' (19) jodu SEmke boiTa kinte kimba nituke bEgTa dhorte bolbe na Jodo Shyam.Obj book.Cla buy.Inf or Nitu.Obj bag.Cla holdlnf say.Fut Neg 'Jodu won't tell Shyam to buy the book or Nitu to hold the bag'

14 Probal Dasgupta

(20) *jodu prothome aSol kOthaTa bole kimba ei ceyarTa Soriye nebe na Jodu first main point. Cia say.Cj or this chair.Cla move.Cj take.Fut Neg 'Jodu won't begin by making the main point or moving this chair' Is there any connection between these properties? So we gather from tbe Exceptional Modal-Vector Hybrid evidence we are about to present. Let us begin by looking at a preliminary fact: the verb pare 'can' in its 'modal' incarnation in the sense ofthe discussion above is in principle capable of supporting dual negation, on both the matrix and the complement verb, see (21 ):

(21) Sucitrar mrittur khObor na dite apni paren na Suchitra's death's news Neg give.Infyou can Neg 'You can't not give the news ofSuchitra's death' The regular infinitival inflection, however, is available in this construction only on the 'lack oflegitimate entitlement' reading of pare(n) na. When the reading is along the lines of 'cannot help but do something', the embedded verb takes an exceptional conjunctive inflection, as in example (22). In such sentences, first described in Dasgupta (1980: 113-8), the modal exhibits what we shall call Modal-Vector Hybrid properties, of which the conjunctive inflection is the most visible. 10 In the simple past, only the 'cannot help but' construal makes sense; consequently, this conjunctive is obligatory- infinitival inflection becomes unavailable, see (23): (22) apni oder Sucitrar mrittur khObor na diye par/en na you them Suchitra's death's news Neg give.Cj could Neg 'You couldn't not give them the news ofSuchitra's death' (23) *apni oder Sucitrar mrittur khObor na dite par/en na you them Suchitra's death's news Neg give.Inf could Neg 'You couldn't not give them the news of Suchitra's death' Turning to properties B and C, we find that the modal-vector hybrid exhibits vector traits, not modal traits, suggesting A-C are interconnected. At (24), preposing to focus with stranding of the complement fails. At (25), complement coordination fails: (24) *apni parlenna oder Sucitrar mrittur khObor na diye you could Neg them Suchitra's death's news Neg give.Cj 'You couldn't not give them the news of Suchitra's death'

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

15

(25) *apni oder oi khOborTa na diye ba kaTingTa na dekhiye par/en na you them that news.Cia Neg give.Cj or cutting.Cia Neg show.Cj could Neg 'You couldn't not give them that news or not show them the cutting' In contrast, when the matrix tense allows the modal to have a deontic reailing and the complement verb to bear infmitival inflection, diagnostics B and C fall in line, enabling control verb preposing (property B) and complement coordination (property C): (26) apni paren na oder Sucitrar mrittur khObor na dite you can Neg them Suchitra's death's news Neg give.Inf 'You can't not give them the news of Suchitra's death' (27) apni oder oi khOborTa na dite ba kaTingTa na dEkhate paren na you them that news.Cia Neg give.Inf or cutting. Cia Neg show.Inf can Neg 'You can't not give them that news or not show them the clipping' The phenomena considered here lead to our second 'new' question: What does the contrast between the complement-modal construction's transparency and the pole-vector compound verb's opacity teach us? And how are we to describe the vector-modal hybrid construction, bearing those teachings in view? 3.3. Doing and transitivity Nobody is surprised that Bangia, like other Indo-Aryan languages, has some transitive composite verbs featuring the light verb IeOra 'to do': ranna kOra 'to cook', Seddho kOra 'to boil (tr)', nOSTo kOra 'to spoil (tr)', mEramOt IeOra 'to repair', bikri IeOra 'to sell', amdani kOra 'to import', rOptani IeOra 'to export', birokto IeOra 'to irritate', greptar kOra 'to arrest', bondi kOra 'to imprison'. Equally unsurprising intransitives feature the light verb hOwa 'to be/become': ranna hOwa 'to be cooked', Seddho hOwa 'to boil (intr)', nOSTo hOwa 'to spoil (intr)', mEramOt hOwa 'to get repaired', bikri hOwa 'to be sold', amdani hOwa 'to be imported', rOptani hOwa 'to be exported', birokto hOwa 'to get irritated', greptar hOwa 'to be arrested', bondi hOwa 'to be taken prisoner'. Some transitives like lokkho IeOra 'to notice',jera IeOra 'to cross-examine', nemontonno kOra 'to invite', Sahajjo kOra 'to help' have no intransitive counterparts; this happens elsewhere in IndoAryan as well.

16 Probal Dasgupta

In addition to these regular composite verbs with the light verb kOra 'to do' that nominative-mark their agents and accusative-mark their patients, however, Bangia also features composite verbs with the light verb kOra 'to do' that are unusual in that they build experiencer subject constructions. Recall that experiencers in Bangia carry genitive inflection. So you get sentences like (28) ramer bhOe korche Ram.Gen fear is.doing 'Ram feels afraid' (29) tomar lOjja korche you.Gen shame is.doing 'You are feeling ashamed' (30) SEmer sinema dekhte icche korche Shyam.Gen cinema watch.Infwish is.doing 'Shyam feels like watching a movie' (31) jodur daMt kOnkOn korche Jodu.Gen teeth kOnkOn is.doing 'Jodu's teeth are going kOnkOn' (32) modhur buk dhORaS-dhORaS korche Modhu.Gen chest dhORaS-dhORaS is.doing 'Modhu's chest is going dhORaS-dhORaS' (33) rupener camRa chEnchEn korche Rupen.Gen skin chEnchEn is.doing 'Rupen's skin is going chEnchEn' (34) dipener naRi chaRbo-chaRbo korche Dipen.Gen pulse give.way.Fut.2x is.doing 'Dipen is like his pulse is about to collapse' (35) diliper pran jae-jae korche Dilip.Gen life goes.2x is.doing 'Dilip is like he's about to lose his life'

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

17

(36) prodiper haMci aSbo-aSbo korche Prodip.Gen sneeze come.Fut.2x is.doing 'Prodip is like he's about to sneeze' Several types are represented above, some of them more productive than others. 11 Many Indo-Aryan languages have nothing remotely similar to this. It is thus a parametric fact about Bangia (and possibly other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, a point awaiting exploration) that certain composite verbs containing the standard transitivity marker kOra 'to do' take experiencer subjects. Hence our third new question: What principles need to be invoked to state the parametric fact that, unlike midland, western and northem Indo-Aryan, Bangia permits certain composite verbs containing the standard transitivity marker kOra'to do' to take experiencer subjects? 3.4. Of defaults and independence We begin the subheading with a colourful use of the preposition of in order to recall the widespread belief- no comment on its sustainability - that of is a default preposition in English. Do Bangia composite verbs or compound verbs display any defaults? There are reasons to believe that the light verb kOra 'to do', when it is indeed specified for transitivity (recall from section 2.2 that some of its uses work differently), does count as a default element, as does its intransitive counterpart hOwa 'to be/become'. One of these reasons has to do with the possibility of coordinating action nominal phrases with such a least-specified light verb, suggesting that these phrases attain a certain degree of independence in its company, as in (37) and (38). In contrast, the marked light verb newa 'to take' does not permit such coordination, as in (39), where each individual conjunct is well-formed: (37) ora bilaSdrobbo amdani ba cal-Dal rOptani korbe na they luxury.goods import or rice-lentils export do.Fut Neg 'They will not import luxury goods or export rice or lentils' (38) oder amole bilaSdrobbo amdani ba cal-Dal rOptani hObe na their regime.Loc luxury.goods import or rice-lentils export be.Fut Neg 'No luxury goods will be imported or rice/lentils exported under their regime'

18 Probal Dasgupta

(39) *timir rupener onnomonoSkotar Sujog ba 2015e OboSOr neben na Tinrir Rupen's absentmindedness.Gen advantage or 2015.Loc retirement take.Fut Neg 'Timir won't take advantage ofRupen's absentmindedness or retire early'

In a curious twist, the nonstandard cases of kOra-marked composite verbs cited in section 2.3 turn out to allow nominal coordination: (40) dipener naRi chaRbo-chaRbo ba diliper pran jae-jae korche na Dipen.Gen pulse give.way.Fut.2x or Dilip.Gen life goes-goes is.doing Neg 'Dipen's pulse is not about to collapse and Dilip is not about to die' Now, what about compound verbs? Do they have a default vector or two? Hook (1993) proposes that certain Indo-Aryan languages have been diachronically pushing vectors into an aspect marking slot, leading to a scenario that may have brought some default vectors into being. But the Bangia facts, going by the coordination criterion (which may not be the optimal test for all purposes), do not suggest default status for jawa 'to go', the prime candidate in this language (or for other vectors we have tried - we will spare you a listing of starred examples): (41) *phuldaniTa timirer hate bhenge kimba or jiniSer bhiRe hariye jabe na flower.vase.Cla Tinrir's hand.Loc break.Cj or his things.Gen crowd.Loc get.lost.Cj go.Fut Neg 'The vase will not get broken by Tinrir or get lost among his things' (42) *ruma timirer ciThi chiMRe ba Somirer upohar puRiye phEle ni Ruma Timir's letters tear.Cj or Somir's presents bum.Cj drop.Pr Neg.Pa 'Ruma has not tom up Tirnir's letters or burnt up Somir's presents' It is possible that some languages do have default vectors, whose properties merit careful exploration. We leave the question of default vectors open as we ask question four: What does the apparent transparency of composite verbs with the light verbs kOra and hOwa tell us that squares with what we have learnt from the lexical idiosyncrasies highlighted in our other questions?

4. Words and their associates This conceptual section presents a model that helps make sense of certain phenomena highlighted in section 2. The framework presented here, called

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

!9

biaxial syntax, distributes descriptive tasks over the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes; hence the label. We refer readers to Dasgupta (2010, 20llb) for basic architectoral features and to Dasgupta, Ford & Singh (2000) and Dasgupta (20lla) for conceptoal foundations 12 • Under biaxial assumptions, what makes words paradigmatically special is their associates. Hot is associated with heat, cold, warm. The logic of association favours idiosyncratic shape for ready recognizability, enabling heat to stand up to 'analogic' pressure trying to torn it into hotness. This and other paradigmatic points may initially look 'obscure and intoition-bound' to an eye trained to notice only syntagmatic generalizations. But let us entertain the thought that the lexicon's preference for compact articnlation may mean that associability-based irregnlar shape has right of way, rnling out 'regular' competitors. In the light of this, consider English went vs *goed, or Bangia gelam '(I/we) went' vs the unattested regnlar form *jelam. To be sure, non-alternating suppletion does not exhaust irregnlarity; regular forms can and do alternate with irregular entities. English lets burnt, learnt coexist with burned, learned. However, substantivist research, of which biaxial syntax is one strand, has proposed that "an irregnlar form bearing a syntactically siguificant featore freely alternates with a regnlar form only if a less general Word Formation Strategy [a device for formalizing certain paradigmatic associations] supports the irregnlar altemant" (Dasgupta 2009: II). This may not be the last word, but the evidence available suggests that the paradigmatic axis combines some formally precise characteristics with arbitrariness, vagueness, and free- floating patterns. This is the environment, biaxial syntax maintains, in which words manage their wordhood. What about compound words, though? Under the assumptions of WWM, the morphological sister of biaxial syntax, a 'compound word' is not formally a constitute in which two full word constituents are structorally nested (Singh & Dasgupta 1999). As far as the grammar (but not the semantics 13) is concerned, a compound word counts as a syntagmatically unitary unsegmentable. Only on the paradigmatic axis do Word Formation Strategies associate it with what the structuralist eye sees as its constituents. However, any word integrity theory must say more to handle cases of a single compoundlike entity manifested sometimes as a unitary word and sometimes as two distinct and non-contiguous words. German verbs with separable prefixes are a case in point- compare the unitary verb in die Tiir zumachen 'to shut the door' with the sentence Bitte machen Sie die Tiir m 'Please shut the door', where its segments are separated.

20 Probal Dasgupta

Linguists committed to lexical integrity have of course considered the problem in the context of well-studied languages. Ackermann, Stump & Webelhuth (20 II: 331) 14 , for instance, propose the notion of a 'periphrase' - a discontinuous entity that lexically counts as a word although its segments also require syntactic handling - and the following principle integrating periphrastic exponence with other aligmnents at the syntax-lexicon interface: (43) Periphrastic realization principle Where lexeme L belongs to category X, cr is a set ofmorphosyntactic properties associated with L, and the realization w1 w2 of the pairing (L,cr) is periphrastic, w1 and w2 may be inserted as the heads of the respective phrases XP and YP. Language-specific stipulations may require XP and YP to form a nested constituent [XP X YP] or may allow them to be independent and discontinuous from one another. Biaxial syntax - without prejudice to lines of inquiry addressing feature traffic issues -points up, in addition, the need to characterize the way a word manages its paradigmatic identity and interlexemic associations. Such a characterization will have to take on board not just periphrases, but other discontinuous syntagmatic phenomena as well that bear on the association question. For an example of such a phenomenon, consider morceau 'piece, fragment'. This French word sounds close to morsel, possibly a cognate. However, modem English morsel, unlike morceau, is all about food. Just what does this difference do to the following sentences? (44) I'd like a morsel of that cake (45) Je voudrais un morceau de ce gateau 'I would like a piece of that cake' Let us call the bond connecting the food word morsel with cake in (44) and missing in its French equivalent (45) a 'morsel bond'. The semantic properties of morsel bonds may well be amenable to formal study. Distinguishing French morceau from food-laden English morsel is conceivably also a cakewalk in the theory of s-selection. What is there to say about the issue, then? Any linguist interested in the ubiquity of collocations in South Asian bilexemics will sooner or later have to deal with morsel bonds. In this connection it pays to look at HPSG work15 on idiomatic expressions and cranberry words (Richter & Sailer 2002, Sailer 2003, Soehn 2009) that gives

Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangia

21

the notion of collocation technical teeth, pardon my food-laden French. Their apparatus is designed to address gross departures from compositional semantics, and to decode spill the beans, say, as really meaning 'divulge the secret'. Can the thinking that underlies their apparatus help illuminate the way morsel bonds invoke collocation, without bringing on the teeth that turn Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother into a technically proficient wolfl Consider (44) in collocational terms. Unlike (45), sentence (44) features a morsel bond; morsel invokes relations of collocation with the food word cake but involves no departure from compositionality. Furthermore, no food word need appear in the same sentence. The word morsel can appear miles away from any explicit food talk; food need not be mentioned in the discourse at all. Morsel bonds - which we shall formally call loose collocation bonds - have a right, but no obligation, to reach out to some other wordls in the sentence or the discourse. In contrast, the tight collocation bond forcing sentence-mate status on beans and spill in the English idiomwe may informally call it a 'beans bond' -motivates the teeth-laden HPSG devices using the marker COLI.. We are looking for a way to place the semantic account of morsel bonds (which we presume should be easy to build) on the same spectrum as the devices designed to handle spill the beans, and to characterize this spectrum in terms of a syntactic and lexical universe of discourse that prescinds from the semantic nitty-gritty, without prejudice to the validity of some future semantic account. Placing morsel bonds, beans bonds, cranberry words and compounds side by side prepares us thematically for the following preliminary characterization of a 'signature sharing' relation that can hold between words qua 'linguistic signs'. The point is to map out how Saussu- rean arbitrariness is distributed at the level of the pre-formal inner mechanics of those entities that undergo formal composition in the official syntax- semantics machine: (46) Degrees of Signature sharing (a) A signature- an interface registration whereby a lexical entry colligates some sound with some meaning into a linguistic sign - takes the form of a biaxial sense cohort.

(b) A trivial, one-member sense cohort consists of one signatory. (c) A compound, or a supertight sense cohort, involves a signatory paradigmatically associated with two co-signatories. The syntagmatic contrast of

22 Probal Dasgupta

one-word exponence vs periphrastic exponence in the sense of (43) does not affect supertight cohort status. (d) In a tight collocation, or a tight sense cohort, the signatory of the cohort (which need not be a structural head) carries a biaxial warrant for the cosignatory satellite. A cranberry word is always the signatory in its sense cohort. (e) Loose collocations issue coupons to effect signature sharing without licensing co-signatories or establishing sense cohorts. We turn now from the inner structure of words (and of entities amounting to words) to the syntactic assembly of words into phrases and sentences. Biaxial syntax breaks this up into two stages. The lexicon-contiguous phrasal stage works with Binodal Dependency Declarations; the predicational stage, in contiguity to the discourse module, assembles the tree. 16 Technical details are given elsewhere (Dasgupta 2011 b). The point here is to connect this with collocations. If speakers of English were to keep saying I recognize your sacrifice, or John recognized Mary's contribution, or Mary tends not to recognize what people do for her, and to stop using the verb recognize in gratitude-free contexts, the verb would soon develop a loose collocation relation with objects denoting help or gifts. Its French participial cognate reconnaissant 'grateful' may have had such a history. What sort of theory of language makes such developments sound plausible? Do we just need a simple-minded story saying "Every time some words W A, WB co-occur in an utterance U, they register the fact of partnership in U; if these partnerships become frequent, the words are likely to issue coupons and formalize a relationship"? But that's a fairy tale, not an account. How close must W A and WB be, configurationally, for such things to happen? The first round of discussion about the syntax of idioms kickstarted by Chomsky (1980: 149ft) led to Marantz's generalization: "there are countless object-verb idioms in English like kick the bucket while subject idioms that are not also full phrasal idioms are rare, if they exist at all" (Marantz 1984: 27). 17 The second round of discussion takes us up to Nunberg, Sag & Wasow (1994); they focus on what the observed patterns ofidiomatization have to do with tropes and other objects of cognitive inquiry, for by that time syntactic interest in the issue had plummeted. They note a subject-verb idiom

Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangia

23

discovered by Alexis Manaster-Ramer that includes a free patient slot, vultures circle P a t i e n t; but they agree that verb-patient idioms are overwhelmingly more frequent than subject-verb idioms. These observations, even in the absence of categorical findings, certainly help. Before we press ahead on the basis of these points, however, it is important to gain some clarity about the questions we are pursuing. Why does the proverb Every dog has his day, whose agent and verb are in collocation, not count as a counterexample to Marantz's generalization the way vultures circle P a t i e n t does? Surely one can say Your managing to get sweet revenge was simply a case ofevery dog having his day? A take-off on a proverb that tweaks its tense features does not count as an idiom instantiated in the present tense. Methodologically, how does our take on collocation distinguish idioms from proverbs? The substantivist framework within which biaxial syntax is niched does for proverbs what it does for lines of verse. It applies the operation Juxtapose Alpha to the entire proverb, placing it in the paradigmatic context of other proverbs in the language. Proverbs and phraseology both deploy collocations to articulate linguistically embedded common sense; but proverbs do not, and phraseology does, belong to the domain of lexical association. A misconceived enterprise of stretching collocations to cover a sentence, building phrasal bridges all over the structure so that an entire sentence template ends up collocationally connected, would not build proverbs; it misses what we take to be the point":

(47) The syntactic limits of tight collocation Tight collocation never crosses predicate boundaries. Proposal (4 7) is compatible with a fairy tale passage like The chocolate giant let little Tim have a morsel and then said, " Watch out, little Tim, my fingers grow back quickly, but my elbows don't, so please don't eat my elbows!", where a morsel bond connects chocolate and morsel across a predicate boundary. But morsel bonds, aggregated, do not add up to a proverb. Only aggregated beans bonds would compose a sentence; (47) prohibits this. Words co-occurring in a phrase set up temporary morsel bonds that can consolidate into beans bonds. Lexicalized morsel bonds - the fairy tale passage shows- are occasionally able to cross predicate boundaries, but only because morsel bonds are loose; cake could just as well have occurred in another sentence of the discourse, or in the tacit context. Co-occurrence-

24 Proba/ Dasgupta

driven issuing of loose collocation coupons as in (46e) must be phrasebound. Signature sharing, however loose, temporary and occasion-driven, never crosses a predication boundary, then. A phrase, thanks to those coupons, counts as a linguistic sign endowed with ad hoc relative motivation in the sense of the classical Saussurean notions of absolutely arbitrary simple signs and relatively motivated composite signs. But no clause is ever a linguistic sign. In terms of associations, the biaxial model views words as the primary site of associative relations on the paradigmatic axis; sense cohorts larger than words come second. Sentences (and sub sentential lines of poetry) gain entry into the paradigmatic through applications of Juxtapose Alpha, notably in poetry and proverbs. But phrases qua phrases have no paradigmatic associates. As freely composed aggregations, they represent partly done tasks of assembly waiting for predication to occur in a concrete situated speech act. After freedom of speech has been fully exercised- in a sentence - Juxtapose Alpha may apply, placing the sentence on the paradigmatic axis. At the level of the word, which precedes and grounds the exercise, every word is surrounded by paradigmatic associates with which it resonates even as it does syntagmatic work in its phrase. But the phrase, in substantivism, has neither the word's pre-assembly automatic access nor the sentence's postassembly self-conscious access to the paradigmatic axis. That a phrase extends the linguistic sign status of the word gives it linguistic flesh without placing it in any paradigmatic field. Notice that a theory committed to this view need not deny the uniformity of syntactic projections in the sense of the bar notation tradition or that of Tesniere (1959). The principles explored here are located at the grammarsemiotics interface, if the grammar per se takes only very limited responsibility for the paradigmatic axis. The substantivist strategy, from Dasgupta, Ford & Singh (2000) to Dasgupta (20lla), has been to implement a structurally uniform syntax but to filter its output vis-a-vis the orthogonal demands of semiotics. In the other direction, is the substantivist approach compatible with the syntactic atomization of apparent words into Ramchand's (2008) Initl Proc/Res nodes at the submotic (word-internal) level, prolifemting supertight signature sharing? The question is empirical. Psychologists have accumnlated a robust body of resnlts concerning word level associations; poetry and proverbs belong to another chamber. If some chamber of associa-

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

25

tions turns out to house submotic !nits and Procs, substantivist inquiry will take it on board, once psychological results flesh out its mentally effective structures. It is from semiotics, not grammar, that we can expect predictions as to the (un-)availability of associations. The verb atomization literature can be froitfully construed as offering a cross-linguistically constant formal semantics for verb meanings orthogonal to cross-linguistic lexico-syntactic diversity. This is compatible with substantivist inquiry's need for a specifiable alignment between semantic formalism and the distribution of compact vs periphrastic exponents of integrallexemes as well as that of signatures in the sense of (46), which are in large part a semiotic issue. The verb atomizer works to keep verbal semantics uniform across language types and prescinds from irregularities; the semiotician at a language-specific level postulates words surrounded by psychologically verifiable associations and must state irregularities with care; the twain can meet if older lexicalist and syntacticist doctrines are not pressed beyond their capabilities. We can now bring these conceptual considerations to bear on the questions raised in section 2. What does trying to describe the cranberry facts throughout the bilexernie verb grid teach us about compositionality and idiosyncrasy in clause structure?- Syntacticians of several persuasions are likely to agree that cranberry words are simply rare at functional head sites, and that there is no more to say". We attach more importance to the frequency of cranberry poles in compound verbs. This frequency is part of the evidence that compound verbs are supertight in the sense of (46). In contrast, no member of an infinitivalcomplement verb/control verb dyad is ever a cranberry word requiring a particular partner on the other side of the dyad - at least in Bangia, and perhaps quite generally. We take this to mean that an infinitival clause boundary is a predication boundary collocation coupons cannot cross. What does the contrast between the complement-modal construction's transparency and the pole-vector compound verb's opacity teach us? How does this lead us to describe the vector-modal hybrid construction?- The first part of this question has been addressed above. As for the second part, while no cranberries come to our aid, irregularity abounds in the vectormodal hybrid construction. It requires strict adjacency between the exceptional conjunctive and the modal - if even an emphatic clitic or a negation marker intervenes, the construction becomes ungrammatical, and the complement verb reverts to the infinitival form. 20 This requirement and the quirky semantics suggest that the vector-modal hybrid is supertight.

26 Probal Dasgupta

However, more must be said. We have claimed above that collocation coupons cannot be issued across an infinitival clause boundary. Given that claim it is surprising that an infmitival plus modal sequence can grow intimate at all, and shocking that it suddenly announces compoundhood. We speculate that certain utterances containing the infinitival-modal sequence, under propitious circumstances, blend with the format of the construction mentioned in note 10 to yield the vector-modal hybrid as a quirky outcome. Question three: What will it take to state that, unlike many sister languages, Bangia parametrically pennits experiencer subjects with composite verbs containing kOra 'to do'? - The strategy used in our conjecture about the origins of the vector-modal hybrid leads to the thought that a sentence like (31 ), repeated below as (48), starts out in Middle Bangia as a standard transitive with the subject Jodu 's teeth and an expressive object kOnkOn: (48)jodur daMt kOnkOn korche Jodu.Gen teeth kOnkOn is.doing 'Jodu's teeth are going kOnkOn'

Once the experiencer subject construction built around a genitive gets established in the language, conditions for (48) to be reanalyzed are met, turning Jodu into a genitive subject, with the rest of the clausal architecture falling into place. This diachronic shift crucially depends on the default status of the light verb kOra 'to do': had it not been a default, it could not have switched its transitivity off to make the shift possible. (In this context, example (40) becomes relevant.) Marked light verbs that are transitive, such as dewa 'to give' or newa 'to take', never head experiencer subject composite verb constructions. What does the transparency of composite verbs with default light verbs tell us that squares with what our other questions help us to see? - The data provided in section 2.4 seem to us to show that a default light verb can retreat from lexicality into core functor status and lose its co-signatorial rights in the paradigmatic part of the lexical entry of the composite verb. When tbis happens, the nominal segment of the periphrase is left holding the signature in its entirety, and coordination can separate it from the default light verb without mishap. In contrast, all compound verbs (modulo the possibility that some languages harbour a default vector or two) and idiosyncratically formed composite verbs require the signatory's unwavering attention to both

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

27

its co-signatories. Coordination and other operations that break the supertight bond holding the periphrase together thereby tear its signature. A word with a tom signature becomes uuinterpretable, leading the sentence to crash. Signature considerations lead us to question the viability of the initial working hypothesis that compound verbs and composite verbs can be usefully subsumed under a superordinate natural class ofbilexemic verbs, differentiated merely in terms of degrees of height in the clausal architecture. Signatures work at a level where diachronic forces make their synchronic efficacy felt At that level the two constructions are subject to distinct types of pressure. To see more clearly why treating bilexemic verbs as a superordinate natural class is unsatisfactory, consider the usage of speakers of Bangia not fully socialized into the nuances of the standard language. Speakers K.M. (in 1966) and S.S. (in 1975) used the non-standard composite verbs ghum kOra 'sleep to.do' and bOrn kOra 'born to.do' (based on bOrn, a loan from English), respectively, for the standard Bangia monolexemics ghumono 'to.sleep' and jOnmano 'to.be.born'. The pressure in favour of the default light verb kOra 'to do' is evident. In contrast, compound verbs are subject to a drift from aktionsart towards aspectogenesis (Hook 1993 ). These pressures have nothing in common. The diachronic evidence converges with considerations from typology. Composite verbs or very similar constructions appear in most languages and tend to be transparent. In contrast, straightforward compound verbs are in complementary distribution with lexical items that combine a verb with a particle or particulate prefix and tend to be idiosyncratic. That comment was only about the well-behaved compound verbs we have been investigating- not just in this paper, but in the literature so far. It is now time to look at some strikingly whimsical Bangia compound verbs, and at a couple of other questions that have been neglected.

5. Rephrasing the question In this section, we consider three topics that motivate specific rearticulations of that question of ours that has had a long shelf life: bipolar compound verbs, lexical affiliation fields, and reactive speech act phenomena.

5.1. Bipolar compound verbs It is time now to look at the exact wording of Rabindranath Tagore's 1938 remarks mentioned earlier, though we save space by omitting glosses:

28 Proba/ Dasgupta

"Another twist: Bangia verbs [kriyapOd in the original] sometimes show up", he wrote, "with two verb lexemes [kriya] stuck together, although their meanings don't add up, for instance: hoye jawa, hoye pORa, hote thaka, hoye oTha; kore jawa, kore phEla, kore to/a, kore dewa, kore cOla, kore oTha, korte thaka. Examples like hoye pORa, kore phEla work the same way; one of the words is not fully verbal [Okriyo], the other one is fully verbal [SOkriyo]. There is yet another way for a noun and a verb- or for two verbs - to combine without their meanings adding up, as in: mar khawa, uThe pORa, gal dewa, boSe jawa, ghure mOra, giye pORa, kheye baMca, neRe dewa" (Tagore 1938/1978: 444). Within the compound verb class, then, Tagore distinguishes two subtypes. The unipolar subtype (relatively well studied from the nineteen seventies onwards) involves a 'not fully verbal' vector combining with a 'fully verbal' pole. The second subtype strikes Tagore as bipolar. Consider the clearest bipolar compound he provides, 21kheye baMca 'eat.Cj to .live= to eat and feel relieved'. To his example we add the following - we are not expecting that all colleagues will accept the entire list, but only that there will be enough overlap to allow our point to squeeze through: (49) a. pore dEkha 'wear.Cj to.see =to try on' b. eSe pouMchono 'come.Cj to.arrive =to get here' c. bhebe pawa 'think.Cj to. get= to figure out' d. bole paThano 'say.Cj to.send =to send word' e. Deke paThano 'call.Cj to.send =to send for' f. likhe paThano 'write.Cj to.send = to send word (in writing)' g. likhe janano 'write.Cj to. inform= to inform (in writing)' h. phire aSa 'return.Cj to.come = to come back' i. phire jawa 'return.Cj to.go = to go back' j. beriye aSa 'exit.Cj to.come =to come out' k. beriye jawa 'exit.Cj to.go =to go out' I. neme aSa 'descend.Cj to.come =to come down' m. nemejawa 'descend.Cj to.go =to go down' n. poRe Sonano 'read.Cj to.cause.to.listen =to read out loud' o. bole bojhano 'say.Cj to.explain =to explain by words alone [an NPI]' p. bujhiye bOla 'explain.Cj to.say =to say in full detail' These examples test positive on standard compound verb tests such as double negation; they cannot be sequences of full verb phrases. (We omit the evidence to save space.) But construing them as aktionsart-enriched variants

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

29

of the first constitoent does not meet the facts of the case. Consider the compound verb (49d) framed in sentence (50): (50) rina bole paThiyecheje mukeS or kachejete pare Rina say.Cj has. sent that Mukesh she.Gen to go may 'Rina has sent word that Mukesh may visit her' What has Rina accomplished - a saying or a sending? Someone has said on her behalf that Mukesh may visit her. Her message is a saying; getting it transmitted by a spokesperson is a sending. It would be disingenuous to describe either sent or word in the English gloss as a function word. Likewise, both bole 'say.Conjunctive' and paThiyeche 'has.sent' in the Bangia sentence (50) merit recognition as full words. The option of recognizing certain verbs as less bleached and therefore not exhibiting prototypical vector properties is standard in the compound verb stodies toolkit. Why are we insisting, then, on a bipolar analysis for (50a-p)? We agree that the less bleached vector concept represents a typologically justified gambit. After all, such not-so-light English items as alive, awake, asleep, aghastexhibit particle properties despite their heavy content. However, the pair ( 50o, p) shows that more needs to be said. Languages with phrasal verbs have no pairs like John stayed alive and *John lived astay, or like Tim lies asleep and *Tim sleeps alie, with the content flipping between the frrst and the second slot of the verb-particle construction. Furthermore, 'inform' at (50g) and 'cause to listen' at (50n) are too content-rich for us to imagine them as happy members of an enlarged class of vectors. The unconstrained proliferation of less-bleached vectors surely stretches the account too far, to the point ofblunting the edge of the vector instrument. We suggest that the problem resembles that of describing the contrast between chairman, batsman and milk booth, phone booth. Linguists who use the label 'suffix' tend to be sharply less willing to apply it to booth than to -man. However, this intoition fails to translate into any defensible structoral account. Only on the paradigmatic axis can a linguistic description reconstruct what is at stake. Even contemporary speakers associate milk booth and phone booth with the independent word booth, whereas the word batsman lost the gloss 'a man who bats' ages ago. Likewise, we suggest, the syntagmatic axis alone does not have the resources to distinguish unipolar from bipolar compound verbs. Only on the paradigmatic axis do bipolars lexically tie up, in the manner described at (46c), with both 'say' and 'send' in a case

30 Proba/ Dasgupta

like (50). Unipolar compounds, at a first approximation, are lexically associated only with one independent verb, called the pole. To state the move this baldly, however, would defeat the pwpose. (46) was set up for the sake of the signature sharing analysis of coordination failures and other data. At that level bipolars and unipolars pattern alike (apologies for not providing the data here). The revision just proposed, left unsupplemented, would destroy the signature sharing account of unipolar compounds. In continuation of the proposal that unipolar compounds are lexically associated only with the pole, we therefore add that a special biaxial processdeutero-associates them also with the independent verb corresponding to the vector': (51) Deutero-association Deutero-associative verbs, unable to exercise valency on their own, are of at least two kinds: (a) Lexical deutero-associative verb like the vector phello 'dropped' issues a lexical deutero-association licence on the basis of one of its compound expansions in the lexicon such as puRiye phello 'burn.Cj dropped = burnt up', thus permitting the head of a distinct predication, here puRiye 'burn.Cj ', to form a supertight collocation bond with it across a predication boundary. (b) A functional deutero-associative verb like the aspectual auxiliary thakbe 'will have' issues a firoctional deutero-association licence on the basis of general principles of grammar, thus permitting the head of a distinct predication, here puRiye 'burn.Cj ', to form a supertight collocation bond with it across a predication boundary, yielding the form puRiye thakbe 'will have burnt'. We will offer only informal remarks by way of generalizing deutero- association to cover the case of composite verbs", and nothing at all in this paper regarding further extensions such as pronominal affixation, clitics, polysynthetic incorporation- beyond noting that our approach helps explain why even polysynthetic languages never exhibit a monstrous megaverb swallowing up all the contents of an indefinitely large swathe of subordinate clauses. For (51) to be able to handle the details of our story about bipolars and unipolars, we propose concretely that in a unipolar case like puRiye phello 'burnt up', as in (51a), the matrix vector 'drop' issues a deutero-association

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bangia

31

licence to the simplex verbal head puRiye 'burn' of the complement clause, whereas in a bipolar case like (50d}, the matrix pole 'send' issues a deuteroassociation licence to the already compound verbal head bole paThalo 'sent word' of the embedded clause. When the two clauses come together, the two occurrences of the pole 'send' undergo fusion under identity. 24 In the history of bilexemic studies, the overall strategy of comparison with a monolexemic (domestic or foreign) synonym had led to the practice of assuming that a compound verb could always be treated as a vector-driven expansion of a unique polar constituent verb. Earlier sections of this paper were based on that first approximation. In section 4.1 we have taken a closer look at the evidence for bipolar compound verbs. On the basis of the data examined, we have introduced formal devices to accommodate bipolars and to distinguish less bleached from thoroughly bleached vectors. We presume that aspectogenesis may lead some vectors to occasionally go all the way and turn into true auxiliaries, which attract the provisions of(5lb). lbis has not happened in Bangia. What about composite verbs? While a collocation line needs no special licence to cross a phrase boundary that is not a predication boundary, the formation of anN V or A V compound involves reconfigoring valency and therefore requires adding further paragraphs to (51), an exercise left for future work. We conjectore that the light verbs kOra 'to make/do' and hOwa 'to be/become' count as functional deutero-associative verbs in the sense of (51 b); this conjecture may help describe adequately some of their properties noted in section 3. 5.2. Lexical affiliation fields We turn now to the paradigmatic phenomena that were noticed fairly early in the study of compound verbs. Dasgupta (1977) noted pairs of compound verbs where the pole and the vectur exhibit transitive/ intransitive correspondences. Consider (52)-(54): (52) a. ganer aSor jome uThlo musical gathering excel.Cj rose 'The musical gathering took off brilliantly' b. dilip ganer aSor jomiye tullo Dilip musical gathering excel.cause.Cj raised 'Dilip wowed the musical gathering'

32 Proba/ Dasgupta

(53) a. srotara Surer neSae mete uThlo listeners melody intoxication.Loc cheer.Cj rose 'The audience's spirits rose, intoxicated by the melodies' b. diltp srotader Surer neSae matiye tullo Dilip listeners.Acc melody intoxication.Loc cheer.Caus.Cj raised 'Dilip raised the audience's spirits with his intoxicating melodies' (54) a. diliper gan SeS hoye eSeche Dilip's songs end be.Cj have.come 'Dilip's song is nearly finished' b. diltp tar gan SeS kore eneche Dilip his song end do.Cj has. brought 'Dilip has nearly finished his song' To handle the phenomena - which are more complex than these examples suggest- Dasgupta (1977: 80-83) proposed 'lexical affiliation fields' by way of trying to launch the "careful study of 'internal, paradigmatic' formal objects (such as Affiliation Fields) wherever they are seen or suspected" (1977: 84). At that stage the worry was about the proper handling of vector meanings. With supertight collocations in place, and with the semantic picture clarified not just by specific paradigmatic inquiry initiatives but in general by advances in lexical semantics, we may reasonably hope to find that 'lexical affiliation field' phenomena reflect general principles. Once this expectation is met, the stipulative account of 1977 will give way to well-grounded generalizations. Had the matter been quite so straightforward, even informal commentary would be uncalled for. However, this neatness appears to be spoiled by surprises lurking elsewhere in the data base. Dasgupta (2003: 67) reports the following examples: (55) OnekceSTar pOr rogi Sere uThlo much effort after patient heal(intr).Cj rose 'After a lot of effort, the patient got better' (56) Onek ceSTa kore ora rogike Sariye tullo much effort doing they patient.Acc heal(tr).Cj raised 'They put in a lot of effort and cured the patient'

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

33

(57) eibar rogi Sere uThbe? Sere oThacchi! now patient heal(intr).Cj will.rise? heal (intr).Cj Lam.making.rise! 'Time at last for the patient to heal? I'll make him heal!' We see at once that (55) and (56) fall in line with the 'affiliation field' material mentioned above. However, (57) exemplifies a quirky phenomenon. Its specific properties crucially leave the 'heal' verb intransitive and package the causative of the 'rise' vector in its 'antiopaque' (Dasgupta 2003) or 'anti-irregular' (Dasgupta 20lla) incarnation. The matter has been described at length (Dasgupta 2003; 2007) under the rubric of the 'sarcastic causative' phenomenon. We are relieved to be able to close section 4.2 on a satisfactory note, then; all is well on the affiliation field front. The apparently disturbing example (57) betokens an orthogonal problem, to which we turn in section 4.3.

5.3. Reactive speech act phenomena The sarcastic causative exemplified at (57) above, along with the sarcastic passive in Bangia and the echo question in English, is flagged by Dasgupta (2007) as reflecting operation (58), 'Look Across'. Since a speech act featuring the application of (58) always counts as a reaction to an earlier speech act, it is convenient to introduce a theory-free term like 'reactive speech act phenomena' for facts in this domain: (58) Look Across A speaker who intends to introduce at point P in her speech act X a direct pointer to point Q in an independent speech act Y can merge an echo of Q at P under some grammatical process GP located at a functional head FH. The subderivation managed by GP, conforming as directly as possible to UG, LooksAcross at the reference derivation Y and fills in the blanks in the domain ofFH. Noting that operation (58) is powerful, Dasgupta (2007) proposes the following interpretive convention to constrain its use: (59) Every application of[(58)] violates the [Gricean] maxim of Manner Reactive speech act phenomena, though obviously orthogonal to our concern in the present study, are a major factor that we have to carefully set aside when we weigh evidence for particular characterizations of compound and

34 Probal Dasgupta

composite verbs. (57) is a case in point; it seems likely that we also need to discount examples like (60) and (61) when we consider lexical integrity issues: (60) nao chobigulo dekhe take picture.Cla look.Cj 'Well, do take a look at the pictures then' ( 61) Tukli ora kOkhonoi korbe na Copy they ever will.do Neg 'Copy? They will never copy' Readjusting our settings in this domain involves revisiting decisions made in earlier work. P. Dasgupta (1977: 74) did recommend that we ignore (60), but conjectured that it was derived by some sort of verb fronting transformation. M. Dasgupta (1990: 17) presented (61) simply as part of the data base relevant for the study of composite verbs. We are now proposing that reactive speech act phenomena be examined separately with these boundary delimitation issues in mind, so that studies of non-reactive speech can appropriately discount reactive effects. Not only reactive effects are at stake. In the context of the properties of compound verbs, consider: (62) toke bolechi oi tarTa nORabi na, tabu oiTai noRiye phelli! you.Acc have.told that wire move.Imp Neg, yet thatone move.Cj dropped 'I told you not to move that wire, but you had to go and move it, didn't you!' This use of the vector 'drop', corresponding to the English construction 'go and VP', expresses consternation and would count as ill-formed in registers that apply the Gricean maxim of Manner. Note that (62) itself does not invoke operation (58)- it exemplifies some other departure from the maxim of Manner. However, consider the contrast between (63) and (64); both conversations exemplify the sarcastic causative in their second sentence, although only (64) features a consternation-expressing vector: (63) A. o jodie kOthaTa puliSke bole dEe tahole bORa bhalo hOe s!he if this point police.Dat tell.Cj gives then really good is 'If s!he were to tell the police this, that would be great.'

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

35

B. oke diye e kOthaTa puliSke bole dewano -eTa amar dara hObe na him/her by this point police.Dat tell.Cj to.give.Caus - this me by will.be Neg 'Getting him/her to tell the police this is beyond my powers.' (64) A. o jodie rOkom EkTa ciThi likhe phEle tahole bORo bhalo hOe s/he if this kind a letter write.Cj drops then really good is 'If s/he were to go and write a letter like this, that would be great.' B. *oke diye e rOkom ciThi likhe phElano- eTa amar dara hObe na him/her by this kind letter write.Cj to.drop.Cause - this me by will.be Neg 'Getting bim/her to go and write a letter like this is beyond my powers.' Rushing in where angels fear to tread, we conjecture that ill-formed (64) contrasts with well-formed (63) because it involves piling one departore from the maxim of Manner on top of another. Despite the obvious difficulties, facing these nuance-laden issues becomes essential- if only to advertently set them aside for particular research domains now that syntactic, morphological and semantic threads are coming together in a unified space of linguistic inquiry. The formal semantic methods that have proved so fertile and the pragmatic research tradition need to start doing business with the relatively neglected semiotic stody of arbitrariness and motivation as we disentangle our threads in the stody of meaning, reference and related issues. The issue of lexical integrity is only one of the points at which these new priorities have to be taken on hoard.

S. Conclusion We began at the classical research question posed by Chattelji and in part answered by Rarnchand. We have tried to note some points at which the question needs rephrasing. Already in 1938, though, Chatterji's contemporary and friend Rabindranath Tagore had formulated the matter in a way that looked identical to Chattelji's question- modulo the casual mode of expression that a poet was entitled to - but in fact contained a time bomb, in the form of the unipolar-bipolar contrast. Within the biaxial framework, the issue of how to describe bipolar compound verbs adequately forces us to examine collocation bonds operating

36 Probal Dasgupta

across a predication boundary. It is unlikely that non-substantivist inquiry can evade this issue for very long. The research trajectory of composite verbs, where at least prima facie the question of predication boundaries does not arise, and that of compound verbs, where it obviously does, may have to diverge. If they do, cover terms such as 'bilexemic verb' or 'complex predicate' will perhaps come to be seen as heuristically useful agenda labels, not as operative analytic terms endowed with technical significance. On another front, if the results of the study of object-verb commonalities in the semantics of the verb phrase (homomorphisms and all) are brought to bear on our best understanding of generic nominals, we may come to understand just what prompts an object noun to shrink and fall into the verb. This too is a domain in which the rigorous study of collocations is likely to prove useful even within frameworks that had set the issue aside in their early idealizations. Since we have reached the point at which other frameworks will take up the serious study of collocations, we should flag a factor that must be borne in mind in such an enterprise. The transparency/ opacity binary that informs inquiry at the level of the syntactic assembly of free expressions has effects demonstrably distinct (Dasgupta 2008) from those of the relative motivation/ arbitrariness binary with which the literature sometimes confuses it. Universal Grammar exists, and informs the syntax, but the theory of grammar does not come with any Universal Lexicon attached. Interlexical studies are based on protracted, rigorous negotiation among the geometries of arbitrariness and motivation that arise in concrete languages. Our reasons for speaking of geometries should be obvious. At least some readers of the present study surely see that the relevant semiotic statements cannot confine themselves to atomic little signs, leaving the business of their free assembly to the formal syntax and semantics. The point is that further patterns of semiotic interdependency operate within and across those freely assembled phrases. Now that we are all committed to taking up the paradigmatic axis for rigorous study, we need to be particularly mindful on this front within the sentence grammar. Beyond the sentence, of course, additional factors make their presence felt. As section 4.3 has demonstrated dramatically, we do not have the option of ignoring discourse: its effects too need to be registered, if only to be set aside explicitly. "And above this ridge new peaks will rise."

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

37

Notes I.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

In the text, we do not emphasize this aspect of the substantivist research programme. But linguists looking at patterns of Saussutean atbitrariness and 'relative motivation' in human languages need to be able to compare their data with an architectonically ideal language where relative motivation is maximized and atbitrariness correspondingly minimized. Linguists can perform such comparisons in ptactice only after they attain proficiency in an idealized language that apptaximates this property as closely as possible while at the same time supporting a sufficiently wide range of cnltoral and discursive practices to enable natoral acqnisition, use and intnitive judgements of lexical viability of patticnlat words and phraseological expressions. Espetanto is available as such a tool (see Dasgupta, Ford & Singh 2000: chapter 4 for an extended example of its use for this putpase); there ate no known alternatives with these ptoperties. That linguists who take some interest in universal grammat do not often use Esperanto as a research tool is an attefact of indefensibly abridged pedagogic ptactices in certain generative linguistics institutions. This term goes back to Dasgupta (1989b: 110). In the present study we use it only heuristically. We argue, below, that there is no such natoral class as bilexemicverbs. Out comment should be read in the context of the fact that the curreot litera!ute hardly makes these choices look inevitable. Salish as described by Davis & Demirdache (2000), for instance, wonld appeat to be of obvious empirical and conceptual pertinence. We retutn to this opaque cranberry verb in section 2.1. Speakers who in their personal lexicon have other uses for paRana and therefore do not accept it as a cranberry word may check to see if the example cokh dhaMdhano 'eye to.opaque.verb =to dazzle' works for them as a cleat case. The syntactic evidence also suggests that the word ghum 'sleep' in ghum paRana 'to put to sleep' is a noun and not some idiosyncratically repackaged polat verb: like any other composite verb, ghum poRono too may expand into a compound verb, taking a vector like dewa 'to give': (i) tumi baccaTake ghum paRiye dao 'you (please go and) put the child to sleep'. Evidence similat to sentence (i) of note 5 also exists for aTka pORa 'to get stuck' and dhOra pORa 'to get caught'. Had this evidence come to light in 1989, the 'qnirky, lexicalized compound verb' construal of such examples would never have been proposed. This example stimulated correspondence with Peter Hook, Alice Davison, Prashant Patdeshi, Renuka Ozatkat, Alexis Manaster-Ramer, Thomas Wasow and Sanjukta Ghosh. Hook reported that cran itself was not a cranberry morpheme: he had seen cranberry harvesting and could vouch for the abun-

38

Probal Dasgupta

dance of cranes as spectator-participants in the process, hence the term cranberry. Hook noted other indubitable cranberry vectors in Hindi-Urdu as well, such as DaTnaa. 8. Speakers ofBangla are likely to point out that one can say (i) ram tomar kOtha bujhte pere gE/o 'Ram managed to understand you'. The compound verb pere gE/o may seem to counterexemplify the claim in the text. However, there is evidence that bujhte para 'to understand', dekhte pawa 'to see', Sunte pawa 'to hear' are special lexical agglomerations - incompatible for instance with independent negation of the matrix and complement verbs - and do not stand as real counterexamples. 9. Given this state of affairs for control verbs, it is unsurprising that para 'to be able' as a raising verb prohibits vectors: consider (ii) briSTi poRte pare 'It may rain' vs (iii) *briSTi poRte pere jabe 'Rain will manage to happen'. Why, though, does the raising verb /aga 'to begin' of (iv) ram SEmke ga/agal dite laglo 'Ram began to abuse Shyam' seem to allow a vector in (v) ram SEmke galagal dite lege gElo 'Ram set about abusing Shyam with gusto'? Does (v) blend (iv) with (vi) ram kaje lege gElo 'Ram took up his task in earnest'? Or does (v) instantiate the superficially indistinguishable purpose infinitival structure? (This construal tumslaga into a control verb, makes the infinitival clause count as an adjunct rather than a complement, and has the effect of removing constraints that would otherwise stop laga from taking a vector.) To approach an answer, consider laga with expetiencer subject verbs, a structure ruling out the purpose infinitival and blend construals. Sentences like (vii) jodur haMSi pete laglo 'Jodu began to feel like laughing' require a monolexemic laglo 'began'. They become ungranunatical if one uses the compound verb lege gElo instead. This evidence suggests that the true raising trigger /aga never co-occurs with a vector. 10. We leave out of the discussion here, but Dasgupta (1980) duly reports, sentences like eTa upen na hoye jae na 'This cannot not be Upen', exhibiting a genuine vectorjae 'goes', where the polar conjunctive on hoye 'be.Cj' becomes regular rather than exceptional. II. Exx (28) and (29) provide further food for thought that cannot be brought into the main text without sidetracking the discussion. In certsin marginal contexts, even the colloquial language still allows the use of bhOe kOra and IOjja kOra as regular, nominative-accusative construction laden transitive verbs. The icche kOra of (30) has stopped permitting this in the colloquial language, but wtitten Bangia in its conservative registers has not entirely lost the option of iccha kOra as a regular transitive. These properties do not hold for the more productive formations illustrated in (31)-(36). The facts about (28)-(30) have something to do with the isolated nature of these lexical items. Possibly we need to reiterate that the expetiencer subject constructions found elsewhere in South Asian languages, where the light verb is 'be' or some other unaccusative, are also

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

39

frequent in Bangia; we are focusing on the ones based on kOra 'to do 'because they are unusual in South Asia. Some of the basic ideas of the present paper are a consequence of mulling over early conversations with Amanda Pounder, whom I thank. Pounder (2004) exemplifies a framework not dissimilar to ours. Dasgupta (2002: 102) addresses the issue of how the meaning of a compound even in the substantivist scheme of things involves the meanings of those words that untrained observers misconstrue as its constitoents. I thank Gert Webelhuth for sending me this text. I thank Manfred Sailer for sending me these texts and for discussing cranberry words with me. Jespersen's (1951: 108-116) junction vs nexus distinction is similar. But the overemphasis on nomiual constructions in bis delimitation of 'junction' strikes us as reflecting intuitions that invite an orthogonal type of treatment. Bhat (2000), writing in a different context, provides an illuminating articulation of those intuitions. In the context of that round of discussion, Marantz (1984: 30) recorded my example Fortune smiled on X In my 1981-82 correspondence I had pointed out to bim that fortune as used here was not a true agent. Even if one were to ignore the contrast between this sentential stereotype and true idioms, I wrote, the conclusion must be that few if any idioms allow an agent and its verb to gang up on a free patient slot. Does Manaster-Ramer's vultures circle P a t i e n t shoot (47) down? Manaster-Ramer (p.c. 2011) notes the relative abundance of such idioms in Polish and other languages whose rich case morphology enables agents to occur in the comment rather than the topic. Must a tightly collocated agent belong to the comment? Does rich morphology make the topic-comment frontier count as the predication boundary under (47)? These questions may help direct further inquiry. In fact we do have more to say on the matter, in the discussion surrounding (51) in section 4.1. Devarati Jana (2011) is about to devote a dissertation to the problem; watch this space. Readers ofTagore need to remember that he and Chatterji pioneered the systematic study of Bangia. In 1938, bilexemic verbs were not a well-understood species at all. When we apply formal diagnostics, not all the V V examples Tagore provides in his second set come out looking like bipolar verbs. Nor is it clear to us, today, what prompted bim to group bipolar compounds with N V composite verbs. As the field of compound verb studies develops further, future scholars rereading Tagore may grasp what he had in mind. Tagore's example lcheye baMca seems a clear bipolar compound verb; so we have chosen to flag it.

40

Probal Dasgupta

22. Conceivably deutero-association helps make sense of the rarity of cranberry vectors - or cranberry light verbs. The need for a specific mechanism responsible for compounds that featore verbs was flagged by M. Dasgupta (1990). She wrote: ''the relative formal freedom of the constituents of a verbal compound in Bangia should be seen as analogous to such phenomena as the positional freedom of upasargas in Vedic Sanskrit, the variable placement of particles in English verb-particle constructions, the privileges of occurrence of the so-called separable prefixes of verbs in Modern German, etc. Perhaps in general any compound whose head is a verb is less tightly constructed than compounds headed by N, A, etc." (1990: 29). 23. We are holding our peace on that matter in this study not ouly due to attention span issues, but also because crucial evidence for the proper treatment of composite verbs will have to come from rich agreement languages such as Hindi-Urdu. Gender and number agreement, where available, flags constituent structore details that remain unclear in Bangia. 24. The account given in the text prescinds from gradient phenomena. The notion of a less bleached vector can be formalized under our assumptions by claiming that a vector with enough content to issue a lexical deutero-association licence, as described in (5la), is less bleached, and that in contrast seriously bleached vectors issue a functional deutero-association licence (like (51 b)'s true auxiliaries), but ouly do so if the lexicon declares that the relevant compound is admissible (in this respect they resemble less bleached vectors). We have found no evideuce for productive bipolar patterns in Bangia and thus do not associate any bipolar compound verbs with Word Formation Strategies; but this is a datadriven decision and may change.

Rephrasing the question ofcomplex predicates in Bang/a

41

Acknowledgements I thank R. Amritavalli, Rahul Balusu, Malasree Dasgupta, Alice Davison, Sanjukta Ghosh, M. Hariprasad, Peter Edwin Hook, K.A. Jayaseelan, Jaklin Kornfilt, P. Madhavan, Alexis Manaster-Ramer, Renuka Ozarkar, Prashant Pardeshi, Amanda Pounder, Gillian Ramchand, Manfred Sailer, Rajendra Singh, Thomas Wasow and Gert Webelhuth for discussion and input. This research was supported in part by a Department of Science and Technology project on Brain Organization in Normative Multilingualism, in part by an Indian Statistical Institute project on the Substantivist Lexicology of Bangia, and in part by an Esperantic Studies Foundation project on the substantivist granunar/ Esperanto studies interface. The usual disclaimers apply.

References Ackermaon, Farrell, Gregory T Stump, and Gert Webelhuth 2011 Lexicalism, periphrasis and implicative morphology. In Nontransformational Theories ofGrammar, B. Horsley and K. Boijars (eds.), 325-58. Oxford: Blackwells. Bhat, D.N.S. 2000 Functional constraints on word-formation rules. In Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2000, Rajendra Singh et a!. (eds.), 31-47. New Delhi: Sage. Chatteiji, Suniti Kumar The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. London: 1926 George Allen & Unwin. 2 vols. Chattopadhyay, Sunitikumar Sharol Bhaashaa-Prokaash Baanggaalaa Beakoron[Easy Grannnar 1972 of Bengali] (Nobin shangshkoron, 'new edition') Kolkata: BakSabitya. Chomsky, Noam 1980 Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press. Dasgupta, Malasree 1990 Composite verbs in Bangia. Indian Journal ofLinguistics 17: 1.1-31. Dasgupta, Probal 1977 The internal gnunmar ofBangla coropoond verbs. Indian Linguistics 38:2.68-85. 1989a Projective Syntax: Theory and Applications. Pone: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute. 1989b A dependency syntax of Bangia. In Metataxis in Practice: Dependency Syntax for Multilingual Machine Translation, Dan Maxwell & Klaus Schubert (eds.), 89-113.Dordrecht: Foris.

42

Probal Dasgupta

The presence of English in India at the crossroads. In The Postcolonial Situation, English at Crossroads, Probal Dasgupta, Amaresh Datta, and Udayon Misra (eds.), 1-132. Guwahati: Guwahati Students' Store. Antiopacity and Bangia causatives: A substantivist approach. In 2003 Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2003, Rajendra Singh eta!. (eds.), 47-70. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Groyter. 2006 The South and Esperanto in the post-orientalist public space. Indian Journal ofLinguistics 24:11-28. Look Across. In Argument Structure, Eric Reuland, Tanmoy 2007 Bhattacharya, Giorgos Spathas (eds.), 213-37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2008 Transparency and arbitrarioess in natural language: some empirical issues. In Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2008, Rajendra Singh (ed.), 3-19. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2009 Strategies and their shadows. In Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2009, Rajendra Singh (ed. ), 3-40. Berlin: Mouton de Groyter. 2010 Compositionality, the prose default and poetry: A cogoitive approach. International Journal of Mind, Brain and Cognition 1:2.55-76. 20 !Ia Inhabiting Human Languages: The Substantivist V"zsualization. New Delhi: Samskriti and the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. 2011 b Agreement and nonfinite verbs in Bangia: a biaxial approach. In Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2010, Rajendra Singh, Ghanshyam Sharma (eds.), 35-48. Berlin: Mouton de Groyter. Dasgupta, Probal, Alan Ford, Rajendra Singh 2000 After Etymology: Towards a Substantivist Linguistics. Miinchen: Lincom Europa. Davis, Henry, Hamida Dernirdache 2000 On lexical verb meanings: evidence from Salish. In Events as Grammatical Objects: The Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax, Carol Tenny & James Pustejovsky (eds.), 97-142. Stanford: CSLI. Hale, Ken, Samuel Jay Keyser 2002 Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2002

Rephrasing the question of complex predicates in Bangia

43

Hook, Peter Edwin The Compound Verb in Hindi. Ann Arbor, illinois: Center of 1974 South and Southeast Asian Studies. 1991 The Emergence of Perfective Aspect in Indo-Aryan. In Approaches to Grammaticalization, B. Heine and E. Traugott (eds. ), 59-89.?Amsterdam: John Benjamins.? 1993 Aspectogenesis and the compound verb in Indo-Aryan. In Complex Predicates in S. Asian Languages, M.K. Verma (ed. ), 97-113. New Delhi: Manohar. 1996 The Compound Verb in Gujarati and its Use in Connected Text.? In Consciousness Manifest: Studies in Jaina Art and Iconography and Allied Subjects in Honour of Dr. U.P. Shah, R. T. Vyas (ed. ), 339-56. Vadodara: Oriental institute. 2001 Where do compound verbs come from? And where are they going? In South Asia Yearbook 2001: Papers from the Symposium on South Asian Languages: Contact, Convergence and Typology, P. Bhaskararao, K.V. Subbarao (eds.), 101-130.?New Delhi: Sage. Jana, Devarati 2011 Conjunctivization. Manuscript, University ofKolkata. Jespersen, Otto 1924 The Philosophy of Grammar. London: George Allen & Unwin. [Fifth reprint, 1951] Kalocsay, KAlman 1966 Vojago inter Ia tempoj. La Laguna de Tenerife: Stafeto. Nunberg, Geoffrey; Ivan A. Sag, Thomas Wasow 1994 Idioms. Language 70:3.491-538. Pounder, Amanda 2004 Haplology in English adverb-formation. In New Perspectives on English Historical Linguistics: Vol. 2, Lexis and Transmission, Christine Kay, Carole Hough, Irene Wotherspoon (eds.), Amsterdam: John Benjamin&. Rarnchand, Gillian 2008 Verb Meaning and the Lexicon: A First-Phase Syntax. Cambridge:

CUP. Richter, Frank, Manfred Sailer Cranberry words in formal grammar. Manuscript, Universitiit 2002 TUbingen. Sailer, Manfred. Combinatorial Semantics and Idiomatic Expressions in Head2003 Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stuttgart: Universitiit Stuttgart (with Universitiit Tiibingen and IBM Heidelberg).

44 Probal Dasgupta Singh, Rajendra, Probal Dasgupta 1999 On so-called compounds. Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics 1999, Rajendra Singh eta!. (eds.), 265-75. New Delhi: Sage. Soehn, Jan-Philipp 2009 Lexical licensing in formal grammar. Manuscript, Universitlit Tiibingen. Tagore, Rabindranath 1938/1978 banglabhaSa-poricOe [Aprofi1e ofthe Bangia language]. robindrorOconaboli 'collected writings ofRabindranath Tagore/ robindronath Thakur' 26:365-456. Kolkata: Visvabharati. Tesniere, Lucien 1959 Elements de Syntaxe Structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

The re-emergence of finite serial verbs in South Dravidian* Gail Coelho

1. Introduction Finite serial verbs (FSVs) consisting of two or more verbs overtly marked for finiteness are relatively rare in South Asian languages, and those that occur in this region are found primarily in the Dravidian language family.'Steever 1988 is a detailed discussion of FSVs in this family, in which the author points out that they are represented in all branches of Dravidian and can, therefore, be reconstructed to Proto-Dravidian (see also Krishnamurti 2003). He also observes, however, that the South Dravidian branch of this family shows a sharp decline in its range ofFSV constructions. Whereas Old Tamil and Old Kannada texts contain a variety of FSV forms (see Section 5 for some Old Tamil examples), the only ones he identifies as FSVs in the modem languages of this branch are echo-word constructions. Since echowords are formed by reduplication of a whole word of any lexical category (not just verbs), they are not truly finite serial verbs in the opinion of the present author, and will, therefore, be excluded from the present discussion. Thus, Steever 1988 indicates that conventional FSVs were lost in the later stages of the South Dravidian branch, but were present in its earlier stages. Steever suggests a functional motive for the loss of this type of FSV in South Dravidian: Only one of the verbs in the FSV is functionally finite (i.e. finite by virtue of its syntactic role), the preceding verbs are functionally nonfinite, but derive their finiteness features by a feature-copying rule that copies them from the finite verb onto the preceding verb(s), which is then morphologically realized as finite. The feature-copying rule functions to mark agreement between the verbs in the complex predicate, but it creates a tension between formal and functional finiteness, which accounts for theloss of such FSVs in South Dravidian. All the FSVs examined by Steever exhibit agreement in their subject-verb agreement features (hereafter, referred to as Agreement features); therefore, a crucial part of Steever's analysis is that the relevant finiteness feature that is copied is gender-number-person Agreement,

46

Gail Coelho

and not features of other categories, such as mood and negation, that are otherwise overtly marked on finite verbs. This paper shows that FSVs have re-emerged in at least one South Dravidian language, Betta Kurumba. 'There are two such constructions in this language, an imperative form and a negative habitual form; only the former is discussed in this paper.'The FSV imperative consists of two verbs, the first belonging to an open class and the second restricted to the motion verbs po:g 'go' and ba:r 'come'. The first verb is inflected for imperative mood alone, while the second verb is inflected for imperative mood and number agreement with the sentential subject. The meaning of the construction is 'go/come V', and it encodes a combination of two directives - a request to perform an action and a request to move location in a direction towards or away from the speaker in order to perform the action. The Betta Kurumba FSVs are quite different from the Dravidian FSVs Steever discussed because, first, they do not exhibit identical marking in Agreement features and, second, it is the mood feature (which is inherently 2"" person) that is shared, not the number agreement feature. This raises the question of accounting for their presence in a South Dravidian language and for their historical development: Are the Betta Kurumba FSVs the last surviving remnants of earlier FSVs inherited from Proto-South Dravidian, or did the construction truly die out in this branch, and then re-emerge independently in this language? I claim in this paper that the imperative FSVs are most likely independent innovations that developed spontaneously to encode, on one hand, the event relation holding between an action and the necessity to move location in order to perform the action and, on the other hand, the double directives involved in asking for both these acts to be performed. Thus, although I do not dispute Steever's insight into the motivation for the loss of FSVs (other than the echo-word type) in the South Dravidian branch, this paper shows that at least a few such constructions have re-emerged in this branch due to other considerations in the language. The widespread tendency of South Asian languages to create new verbs by combining existing verbs in synthetic compounds manifests itself in most cases in sequences ofnonfinite verb(s) plus single finite verb. However, the same tendency can be expected, in some cases, to produce finite verb combinations, depending on the nature of the events or the type of action encoded. Steever, in his discussion, says also that the prototypical serial verb is a compound verb because "it automatically satisfies the requirement that all the components of the [serial verb form] should have the same subject-verb

The re-emergence of.finite serial verbs in South Dravidian

41

agreement features,. (1988: 39). Therefore, he expects languages in this family to have compound verbs that parallel FSVs, and he gives examples from languages such as Old Tamil, which satisfy this expectation. Betta Kurumba, interestingly enough, does have a compound imperative which parallels the FSV imperative in form and function. The historical development of this form is also discussed in conjunction with that of the FSV imperative. The paper begins with background information about the system of contrasts among simplex imperatives in Betta Kurumba (Section 2), followed by a section on the FSV imperative (Section 3) describing its form and function and providing arguments to justify its analysis as a serial verb form. The compound imperatives are discussed briefly in Section 4, and the historical development ofboth constructions is traced in Section 5. The main points of the paper are summarized in Section 6.

2. The system of eontrasts among simplex imperatives Betta Kurumba has a ternary contrast between nonpolite, casual, and polite imperatives, as shown in (1). The nonpolite imperative suffixes are /-':)y/ 'singular' and /-o/ 'plural'; roots ending in /i/ normally occur without the singular nonpolite imperative suffix (Ia, c, e, g).4The casual imperative has a single suffix /-a/ that is used for both singular and plural subjects. The polite imperative suffixes are /-agay/ 'singular' and /-ago/ 'plural'. An important aspect of Betta Kurumba verb structure is that functional categories are expressed not only through category-marking suffixes, but also through the type of verb base used. Different functional category markers subcategorise for a specific verb base from a choice ofthree verb bases in the language, which I refer to as themes, so as to distinguish them from other verb stems: the bare theme, the realis theme, and the irrealis theme. The casual and polite imperative suffixes attach to a realis theme, which consists of the root or derived stem (i.e. root plus derivational suffixes) plus a realis theme formative;' e.g., "naqi 'walk' takes the realis theme formative /-d/ to form the realis theme naq(j-, to which the suffixes /-a, -ag':)y, -ago/ attach, resulting in naq(ja, naqgagay, and naqgago, respectively (la). The nonpolite imperative suffixes, on the other hand, attach to the bare theme, which consists of just the root or derived stem with no theme formative at the end; e.g., bare theme pa:l 'tell' takes suffixes /--;,y, -o/ to form pa:l--;,y and p-;,:l-o, respectively (lb).

48

Gail Coelho

There are five realis theme formatives /-c;!, -t, -j, -s, -is/; therefore, verb roots fall into classes based on the realis theme formative they take: D-class, T -class, J-class, S-class, and IS-class. Verbs of the last class differ from the others in their realis theme formation; they have a regular theme formed with a final realis formative /-is/, and a special realis theme that does not contain /-is/. The special realis theme is the one used in the casual and polite imperative. It is formed by changing the last preconsonantal vowel of the root, if it is nonfront, to a diphthong or front vowel (see Coelho 2003 for details); any retroflex consonant immediately after this vowel is changed to its nearest alveolar counterpart. The difference may be seen by comparing the realis themes mekk-, erg-,puyt-, and nayr- of the IS-class verbs in (le) to the realis themes of the other classes in (la-d). (1) a. i. ii.

Root D-class: naqi 'walk'

p:;,:L 'tell'

Nonnolite

Casual

Polite

nacl=cJ.-ag:;,y naq=g-ago

sg. pl.

naqi naqi-yo

naq=g-a

sg. pl.

p:;,:L-:;,y p:;,:L-o

p:;,=g-a

sg. :;,qi pl. :;,qi-yo

:;,q==t-a

II

II

p:;,=g-ag:;,y p:;,=d-ago

b. T-class: i. ii.

:;,qi 'take' ma:L 'sharpen'

iii. nacl 'plant'

II

:;,q=t-ag:;,y :;,cl=t-ago

sg. pl.

ma:L-ay ma:l-o

ma: ==t-a

ma:=t-ag:;,y ma:=t-ago

sg. pl.

naq-ay naq-o

nat =t-a

nat=t-ag:;,y nat=t-ago

sg. pl.

nili nili-yo

nil=j-a

sg. pl.

ki:l-ay ki:l-o

ki=j-a

sg. pl.

beli beli-yo

bel=s-a

II

c. J-class: 1.

nili 'play'

ii.

ki:l 'do'

d.

S-class: beli 'pull'

i. ii.

ti:l 'place'

sg. ti:l-ay pl. ti:l-o

II

II

II

ti=s-a

"

nil=j-agay nil=j-ago ki=j-agay ki=j-ago bel=s-ag:;,y bel=s-ago ti=s-agay ti=s-ago

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian 49

e.

IS-class: i. mekku 'smear'

11.

Ill.

IV.

argu- ergu'sleep'

pu:tu- puytu'lock' no:q- n::Jyr'look'

sg. mekk-:;,y pl. mekk-o

mekk-a

sg. arg-oy pl. arg-o

erg-a

sg. pu:t-::JY pl. pu:t-o

puyt-a

sg. no:q-oy pl. no:q-o

n::Jyr-a

, , , ,

mekk-agoy mekk-ago erg-agoy erg-ago puyt-ag::Jy puyt-ago nayr-ag::Jy nayr-ago

The role that the theme plays in the exponence of functional categories is demonstrated through a comparison of the casual imperative and hortative words in (2). Both categories have a homophonous suffix 1-aJ, which is attached to the realis theme to form the casual imperative, but the bare theme to form the hortative. Thus, it is the theme alone that makes these categories formally distinct. (2) a.

b. c.

d. e.

Root naqi 'walk' Qqi 'take' nili 'play' beli 'pull' pu:tu-puytu 'lock'

Casual imp. nact=d-a ::Jct=t-a nil=j-a bel=s-a puyt-a

Hortative nact-a Qct-a nil-a bel-a pu:t-a

The verb roots po:g and ba:r are irregular verbs, whose imperative forms are shown in (3). The root takes /-~y/ 'singular' and /-o/ 'plural' in the casual as well as the polite imperative. In the case of 'go' the casual and polite forms are distinguished by the root alternants pi:g and po:g, rather than a difference in suffixes. The verb for 'come' does not truly distinguish politeness level, the truncated form ba: is merely less formal than the full imperative forms shown under the polite column. po:g also has truncated forms, each encodes a lower degree of formality or politeness than the corresponding full form. All the truncated forms, pi:, po:, ba: are used for both singular and plural subjects- number is encoded in this case by the use of the singular or plural subject pronouns niy~ '2nd sg.' and nil')g~ '2nd pl.'; the latter can also be used with a singular addressee to convey respect.

50

Gail Coelho

(3)

a. b.

Root

Nonpolite

Casual

Polite

po:g 'go' ba:r 'come'

po:

po:g-ay, po:g-o ba:

(pi:), pi:g-oy, pi:g-o baray, baro

3. The FSV imperative The FSV imperative consists of two verbs each inflected for imperative mood, of which the first verb (Vl) is drawn from an open class of verbs, and the second verb (V2) is restricted to po:g 'go' or ba:r 'come'; examples are given in (4). Inflection on Vl is invariant and matches the casual imperative forms discussed above. Inflection on V2 varies according to the number and politeness level of the construction. The FSV imperative is considered a polite form of address, more polite than the compound imperative described in Section 4, and so the root altemant of 'go' used in V2 is the polite imperative form, pi: g. In the case of ba:r, all the three forms baray, baro, and ba: are allowed as V2, although it is considered not very nice to use ba: with a person ofhigher status. The FSV imperative with ..Jac(.i 'close' as VI.

(4) a.

1.

ii.

bal')ani bal')ani

aclta acli=t-a

pi:gay. pi:g-ay

door close=RF-c.IMP '(You) go close the door.'

goPOL-SG.IMP6

bal')ani bal')ani

baray. ba:r-:;,y

aclta acli=t-a

door close=RF-C.IMP come-sG.IMP '(You) come close the door.'

b. i.

bal')ani bal')ani

act.ta acli=t-a

pi:go. pi:g-o

door close=RF-c.IMP goPOL-PL.IMP '(You all) go close the door.'

ii.

bal')ani bal')ani

aclta acli=t-a

baro. ba:r-o

door close=RF-c.IMP come-PL.IMP '(You all) come close the door.'

The re-emergence of.finite serial verbs in South Dravidian

51

The FSV imperative can contain no more than two verbs marked with imperative mood. This restriction follows from the event relations that it is the function of the FSV imperative to encode. This construction is used to encode just two things: that an action is to be performed, and that the action requires movement. The action itself may have several facets to it, but these must be expressed through other mechanisms available in the language for stringing together verbs in a clause, such as a ''nonfinite serial verb", consisting of a string of one or more nonfinite verbs marked with /-gnu/, followed by a final verb that may be finite or nonfinite depending on the syntactic role of the clause as a whole. Examples of such nonfinite serial verbs can be seen in (5) in the form of aqtgnu puyta 'close and lock' (5a.i) and :)dd:mu ngyra 'stand and look' (5b.i). The verb marked with /-:)nu/ functions like the ''past participle" or "conjunctive participle" characteristic of the South Asian language area (Masica 1976) or the "converb" in e.g. Haspelmath 1995. It occurs either as the head verb of a nonfinite clause or as the nonfinal verb in a monoclausal verb sequence in the type of construction that is often called a "compound verb" (e.g. Steever 2005) or "serial verb" (e.g. Nagaraja 1990; Jayaseelan 2004). I refer to such monoclausal verb sequences as ''nonfinite serial verbs" to distinguish them from the FSV imperative and the compound imperative. (5) a.

bal}ani acltanu bal}ani aqi=t-anu that door close=RF-ACP 'Go close and lock that door.'

puyta puytu-a lock...-c.IMP

pi:gay. pi:g-ay goi'OL-SG.IMP

bal}ani aetta bal}ani acli=t-a that door close=RF-ACP 'Go close and lock that door.'

puyta puytu-a lock...-c.IMP

pi:g.,y.s pi:g-ay goi'OL-SG.IMP

illi add.,n illi a:l=d-anu 2SG.NOM here stand=RF-ACP 'You come stand here and look.'

n.,yra nayr-a look_-c.IMP

baray.9 ba:r-oy come-sG.IMP

n:ayra n:ayr-a look -c.IMP

bar:ay. ba:r-ay come-sG.IMP

i. a:

a:

ii.

**a: a:

b. i. ni: niya

ii **ni:

illi ~~a niy:a illi :a:l=c;i-:anu 2sG.NOM here stand=RF-ACP 'You come stand here and look.'

!Ill

52 Gail Coelho

The sentences in (5) have a nonfinite serial verb construction nested inside an FSV imperative; (5a.i) has the structure [[a: bar)ani atanu puyta] pi:gay], and (5b.i) has the structure [[addanu nQyra] barQy]. The corresponding forms with imperative marking on all verbs in these sequences are ungrammatical (5a.ii, b.ii). The multi-faceted nature of the first action is encoded through the nonfinite serial verb, while the FSV imperative as a whole encodes the directive to perform the (multi-faceted) action together with a directive to go/come in order to perform the action. Since the construction expresses just these two directives, no more and no less, it is limited to just two verbs marked for imperative mood.7 If an action is not accompanied by change in location, a directive to perform the action cannot be expressed through an FSV imperative. Thus, although the motion verb 'go' is used in the monoclausal verb sequence in (6a), the two verbs are in a nonfinite serial verb construction because the motion verb is used to encode change in state ('fall asleep'), and not change in location. Contrast this sentence with (6b), which does include change in location. (6) a.

ni: niy:;,

illi illi

erg:m ergu-:;,nu

pi:g:;,y. (**erga pi:g:;,y) pi:g-:;,y

2sG.NOM here sleep,..-ACP gof0L-SG.IMP 'You go to sleep here!'(= Fall asleep here.) b.

ki:dl ki:ri-:;,1

erga ergu-a

pi:g:;,y}0 pi:g-:;,y

house-LOCSleepn-C.IMP goPOL-SG.IMP 'Go sleep in the house.' (= Move to the house to sleep.)

The FSV imperative does not, in itself, combine the two motion verbs po:g and ba:r; however, there is one analogic form that has developed in the language, in which the verb sequence is banda pi:gay/pi:go/pi: 'go and come' (7). The Vl in this is formed just like the casual imperative of regular verbs, and consists of the realis themeban of ba:r 'come' plus realis formative /-t/ plus casual imperative /-a/. However, this form of ba:r does not occur in any other context, so the sequence can be considered a frozen form, rather than an FSV imperative per se. (7) a.

ke:kl)a ke:kl)a

banda ban=t-a

pi:go. pi:g-o

tomorrow comea==RF-C.IMP goPOL-PL.IMP 'Go and come tomorrow.'

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian 53 b.

pina n:;)ydn pi:go. banda pi:g-o pina nayr-anu ban=t-a then look...-ACP comeR==RF-C.IMP goPOL-PL.IMP 'Then go look and come.'

A claim that the FSV imperatives discussed above are serial verbs must, of course, be supported by empirical evidence that the verb sequence is part of a single verbal predicate, rather than a sequence of two sentences. 11That is, it must be shown that an utterance such as the one in (8) consists of a single finite clause, and not the two sentences ka:lrt. sa:y kuc(.sa 'Kaalan, drink some tea' and pi:g:)y 'Go'. (8)

ka:lrt ka:lrt

sa:y sa:ya

kuc(.sa kuc(.i=s-a

K.aalan tea drink=RF-C.IMP 'Kaalan, go (and) drink some tea.'

pi:g:~y.

pi:g-:;)y go..._-SG.IMP

For a start, the utterance in (8) is produced with the intonational contour of a single clause and without a pause between the verbs; a pause and/or the appropriate intonational contour would be necessary to give it a bisentential interpretation. Further, if (8) was bisentential, it would have a different pragmatic interpretation from the free translation given in the example: in a bisentential reading, the two sentences would constitute two distinct requests which could potentially be addressed to two different individuals, and the two actions could potentially be performed at separate times. Instead, my consultants have confirmed that, when uttered without a pause, this utterance cannot be addressed to more than one person (note that the final verb is singular) and the two actions are to be performed in conjunction. A bisentential interpretation of (8) is, moreover, pragmatically odd because of the difference in politeness level in the two verbs. The oddness is not too great if the addressee were of equal or lower status than the speaker: the multiclausal reading would imply that the speaker began with a casual form (kuc(.sa) and switched politeness level midway through the discourse act, ending in a polite form (pi:gay). But the oddness gets worse when the addressee is ofhigher status because the first verb is not an appropriate mode of address for such a person, rendering sa:y(:)) kuc(.sa sociolinguistically unacceptable in this context, as shown in (9), where the addressee is gyari, the term used for a person of high status who lives an anglicized lifestyle. The fact that none of these problems arise when the sentences in (8-9) are

54 Gail Coelho

used, regardless of the status of the addressee, indicates that the utterance is not bisentential. (9) ~yari

kuqsa pi:gay kuqi=s-a pi:g-::~y sahib tea drink=RF-C.IMP goPOL-SG.IMP ?'Sir, drink some tea. Please go.'- multiclausal reading 'Sir, please go drink some tea.' - monoclausal reading ~yari

sa:y

sa:y::~

Additional evidence for the monoclausalstatus of the FSV imperative comes from the argument structure of the sequence, as shown in (10), where the goal argument of the second verb occurs before the verb sequence, in fact before the internal argument of the first verb. (10) yan ki:rka niss tinda ki:ri-ka niSSQ tin=l;-a yan lsG.GEN house-oAT food eat=RF-c.IMP 'Come to my house to eat some food.'

bar::~y. ba:r-::~y

come-so.IMP

Further, one or both arguments of the verbs can be postposed to a position after the verb sequence, as in (lla), without changing the meaning of the sentence. This order would be ungrammatical if the two verbs belonged to different sentences because these verbs do not subcategorize for the particular noun phrase adjacent to each verb, **[yan ki:rka tinda. bar:;,y niss:J]. The postposed noun phrase in ( 11 b) is grammatical on either a hisentential or monoclausal analysis, but note that the semantic interpretation differs under the two analyses. Moreover, the speaker would need to pause between the verbs or alter the intonation pattern of the utterance to convey a bisentential interpretation. (11)

ki:rka a. yan tinda yan ki:ri-ka tin=t-a lsG.GEN house-OAT eat=RF-C.IMP 'Come to my house to eat some food.'

baroy

nisso. nisso come-so.IMP food ba:r-::~y

b. niss tinda baray yan ki:rka. nisso tin='l;-a ba:r-oy yan ki:ri-ka food eat=RF-c.IMP come-so.IMP lso.GEN house-oAT 'Come to my house to eat some food.' - monoclausal reading 'Eat some food. Come to my house.' - multiclausal reading

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

55

In addition, the utterance would not be governed by the formal and functional restrictions described in Section 3 if it was a sequence of two sentences - there would be no motivation for restricting the sequence to two verbs, restricting inflection on the verbs to specific forms of the imperative, and restricting the second verb root to po:g/ba:r. The construction also shows other restrictions commonly found among serial verbs: The order of the verbs cannot be switched (**niss baray tinda) and nothing can intervene between the two verbs in the FSV. Although it can be established that these imperative-marked verb sequences are mono clausal and, therefore, FSVs, the formal asymmetry in the construction is odd. The first verb is identical to the casual imperative form, but this marker is ignored and the politeness level of the construction is read off the second verb alone. Number is also encoded in the second verb alone. It is hard to identify a functional motive for using markers from two different parts of the imperative system on the two verbs. It is surely simpler to construct a serial verb in which both verbs are marked for the same politeness level. Moreover, the FSVs in all of Steever's (1988) examples from other Dravidian languages have verbs marked for the same Agreement features. This formal asymmetry is discussed in Section 5, where I argue that there is good reason to believe that this FSV had uniform marking on both verbs at an earlier stage of Betta Kurumba.

4. The compound imperative The compound imperative has a parallel form and function to the FSV imperative. It consists of a single compound verb in which the bare theme (from out of the three themes in the language, as described in Section 2) is combined with an imperative form of ba:r or po:g. The compound imperative is considered a little less polite than the FSV imperative, so the root altemant of 'go' that is used is po:g- the same altemantfound inthe nonpolite imperative forms, po:g-ay/-o. The other motion verb, ba:r, does not display a difference in form between the FSV imperative and the compound imperative. Examples from each verb class are given in (12), with the FSV imperative included for comparison. (12)

Root a. naqi 'walk' b. p:;):l 'tell'

c. aqi 'take'

Compound imperative

FSV imperative

naqi+po:gay p:;):l+po:g:;)y aqi+po:gay

naqga pi:gay p:;)c;!a pi:g:;)y a stance or postural verbs > stative intransitive verbs > transitive verbs. Some languages (e.g. Kaititj, an Arandic language of central Australia (Harold Koch, pc. cited in Foley and Olson 1985) allow serial verbs to be formed only with motion verbs. Languages such as English, that do not otherwise use serial verbs as a productive grammatical technique, have the go/come V sequence, as discussed in Pullum 1990.15Not all linguists consider the English construction to be a serial verb: Aikhenvald and Dixon (2006:46) call them double verb constructions which "cannot be considered

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

6!

on a par with" serial verbs because they are ''restricted in their mood, polarity, tense, and aspect choices ... are limited to just a few words ... [and] ... a conjunction or a dependency marker can be inserted between the components with no change in meaning". They consider them to be "instances of incipient serialization" which may develop into "fully-fledged SVCs as a grammatical technique" .1'But just the fact that this "incipient serialization" has begun in English with motion verbs is indicative of the cross-linguistic tendency to favor go/come as one of the verbs in complex predicates and, perhaps, as the verbs with which a language kick starts its use of this grammatical technique. Thus, the fact that a serial verb consisting of go/come plus V cropped up independently in Betta Kurumba is not altogether surprising, but what is curious are three things: First, the construction is limited to the imperative category. Second, the construction has been innovated using multiple fmite verbs, rather than make use of the widespread grammatical technique in South Asian languages of combining nonfinite with finite verbs to make complex predicates. Third, the verbs exhibit an asymmetry in the markers used on each of them. With respect to the first issue, the restriction to imperative mood, it must be noted that English go/come Vis also limited in its inflectional possibilities. Pullum points out that the serial form can only be used in constructions where the verb does not take an affix (19}, which in English is the imperative (19a-c), the infinitive (19d), and the habitual (19e}. 17 1t is significant that the imperative figures in this set of grammatical contexts; one may speculate that the "incipient verb serialization" in the language started with the imperative, and spread to those granunatical contexts in which the verbs resemble the imperative in form by being affix-less. Thus, while motion verbs are the class of verbs with which verb serialization tends to begin, the act of making a request may be the grammatical context in which the beginning tends to be made. (19) English serial verbs with come/go (Pullum 1990:218-219) Come fly with me. Come see about me. Go get the paper. I told you to go get the paper. e. Everyday I go get the paper. f. ••Everyday my son goes get the paper.

a. b. c. d.

62

Gail Coelho g. **I went get the paper. h. **Going get the paper is not my job. 1. **1\(y dog has gone get the paper.

With respect to the second issue, finite rather than the more ''normal" nonfinite marking on the first verb, recall that the purpose of the FSV imperative is not merely to encode a multi-faceted event using multiple verbs, but specifically to encode two directives rolled up in one construction. If imperative mood was marked on only one verb, the verb sequence would convey the multi-faceted nature of the actions referred to, but not the illocutionary force of two directives. Thus, finiteness marking in the form of mood markers on both verbs follows from the type of event expressed by the sequence. The third issue requires an examination of the development of the Betta Kurumba imperative system as a whole. This is done in the following subsection. 5.1. Changes in the imperative system of contrasts As shown in Section 2, the Betta Kurumba imperative system displays a ternary contrast between nonpolite, casual, and polite imperative; each of which have forms that are distinct from one another. This system differs in form from other South Dravidian languages because, in the latter, the polite form consists merely of the plural imperative, which doubles up for both the pragmatic roles of marking plurality and politeness. Betta Kurumba in contrast has separate polite and nonpolite forms, with a singular and plural in each category. Therefore, the question to be asked is how these contrasts developed in this language. The suffixes of the nonpolite category in Betta Kurumba can be straightforwardly identified as cognate with imperative suffixes in other South Dravidian languages: Krishnamurti (2003:358) says that "except for Tulu, the remaining South Dravidian I languages have the singular formed by -0 or -ay, the second singular suffix of finite verbs. The plural is formed by a variant of -*w-in (non-past marker plus the plural suffix *-iml-ir)". Subrahmanyam (1971:491-492) says that Old Tamil used --ay optionally, and that plural can be reconstructed as *-(uli)m in Prato-Dravidian. It is apparent that the Betta Kurumba suffixes /-oy/ 'nonpolite imperative singular' and /-o/ 'nonpolite imperative plural' are reduced forms of -ay and -*-(u/i)m, respectively.

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

63

But, the suffixes of the other two categories, casual and polite, do not match the imperatives of other Dravidian languages in their form. The polite imperative pair can be identified as the outcome of a process that is extremely widespread in Dravidian languages (discussed in Steever 1988, 1993) of fusing roots with affixes, often accompanied with truncation, to form new affixes. Thus, the polite imperative has clearly developed from a compound consisting of the erstwhile past participle and the root a:g 'become', followed by the inherited imperative suffixes /-~y, -of. The latter section of the compound, a:g-~y. a:g-o, has lost vowel length to become the polite suffixes /-ag~y, -ago/. The suffix used in the casual imperative /-a/ does not closely resemble an attested verb root in the language in the way that /ag/ of the polite imperative does; however, clues to its history lie in two facts: It is identical to the first vowel of the polite imperative suffixes, and the verb base it subcategorizes for is the same as that of the polite imperative, namely the realis theme. The casual imperative is, therefore, identical to the polite imperative in all segments except that it lacks the final syllable /gay, go/ of the latter (see the examples in ( 1) repeated below as (20). This is particularly remarkable in the case of roots that have the front/nonfront vowel alternation- the same alternation is in words of both categories, due, of course, to the fact that both involve the realis theme. The casual imperative form must, therefore, be the outcome of a truncation rule that deleted the fmal syllable of the polite imperative, giving rise to a new politeness category. Truncation would explain the absence of a nwnber distinction in the casual imperative category, since the nwnber-marking segments lay, o/ were lost in the process. (20) a.

b. c. d. e. f. g.

h. 1.

j. k.

1.

Root

Casual

Polite

nact,i 'walk' pa:l 'tell' ::~qi 'take' ma:l'sharpen' nili 'play' ki:l 'do' beli 'pull' !i:l 'place' mekku 'smear' argu ~ ergu 'sleep' pu:tu ~ puytu 'lock' no:ct- noyr 'look'

nact~-a

naq=g-agay, naq=g-ago p~-agay, p:FQ-ago oct=1;-agoy, ::~ct=t-ago ma:=t-agay, ma:==t-ago nil=j-agay, nil=j-ago ki=j-agoy, ki=j-ago bel=s-agay, bel=s-ago !i=s-agay, ti=s-ago mekk-agay, mekk-ago erg-agay, erg-ago puyt-agay, puyt-ago noyr-agoy, noyr-ago

p~-a

oct=1;-a ma:==t-a nil=j-a ki9-a bel=s-a ti=s-a mekk-a erg-a puyt-a noyr-a

.

.

.

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

65

The truncation analysis can be used also to account for the development of the compound imperative. The first verb in this compound is identical in form to the first part of the nonpolite imperative because both are formed with the bare theme as verb base (22). (22)

Root

a. naqi 'walk' b. p:l:l 'tell' c. d.

e. f.

g. h. i.

j. k.

1.

::~qi

'take' ma:l'sharpen' nili 'play' ki:l 'do' beli 'pull' ti:l 'place' mekku 'smear' argu - ergu 'sleep' pu:tu - puytu 'lock' no:q- nayr 'look'

Nonpolite imperative naqi, naqi-yo p:l:L~y, pa:l-o oqi,o~,i-yo

ma:l-:ly, ma:l-o nili, nili-yo ki:l-ay, ki:l-o beli, beli-yo ti:l-ay, ti:l-o mekk~y, mekk-o arg-ay, arg-o pu:t-ay, pu:t-o no:q-oy, no:q-o

Comnound imperative naqi+po:g::~y

po:l+po:gay aqi+po:gay ma:l+po:goy nili+po:gay ki:l+po:g:ly beli+po:gay ti:l+po:g:ly mekku +po:gay argu+po:gay pu:tu+po:gay no:q+po:g:ly

It may appear at first glance that the bare theme consists of just a verb root, to which imperative forms of po:g/ba:r are attached in forming the compound imperative. But there are words in the J- and S-classes that exhibit a root alternation in their themes, and these provide evidence that the basic root is not truly the form used in the bare theme. Examples of these words are given in (23-24): Note that these roots have an altemant containing a diphthong in the bare theme, which forms the verb base for the nonpolite and compound imperatives in (23), but an alternant containing a nonfront monophthong in the realis theme, which forms the verb base for the casual and polite imperatives. This alternation between nonfront vowel and diphthong resembles in some ways the alternation exhibited by IS-class roots discussed above; however, S- and J-class verbs deploy their two root alternants in a different manner from the IS-class. In these classes, the alternant with the diphthong is used in the bare theme and irrealis theme, while the alternant with the nonfront monophthong is used in the realis theme. Since the alternant with the diphthong is derived by a morphophonological rule from the root, which has an underlying nonfront monophthong, the alternant used in the bare theme cannot be the basic root itself, but a derived form.

66

(23)

Gail Coelho

Root Nonpolite imp. uyli{-yay}, uyli-yo a. uli- uyli 'descend' b. muri- muyri 'mince' muyri(-y~y), muyri-yo kuyri{-y~y}, kuyri-yo c. kuc(.i- kuyri 'drink' payri(-yay), payri-yo d. pari - payri 'pluck'

(24) a.

b. c. d.

Compound imp. uyli+po:gay muyri +po:goy kuyri+po:gay payri + po:goy

Root

Casual imp.

Polite imp.

uli- uyli 'descend' muri - muyri 'mince' kuqi - kuyri 'drink' pari - payri 'pluck'

ul=j-a mur=j-a kuq=s-a par=s-a

ul=j-agay, ul=j-ago mur=j-agay, mur=j-ago kuq=s-a goy, kuq=s-ago par=s-ag~y, par=s-ago

This means that the compound imperative is not formed merely by combining a verb root with imperative forms of po:glba:r, but by combining the bare theme with the latter. The fact that this same verb base is used in the nonpolite imperative cannot be a mere coincidence. It suggests that the compound imperative was once a sequence of two verb words, each inflected for nonpolite imperative mood. The truncation rule must have deleted the last vowel from the Vl (the diphthong /';ly/ and monophthong /o/), leaving just the bare theme. Since phonological and morphological constraints in the language prevent the bare theme from functioning as a word, this morphological unit would then have joined the V2 as a compound. Thus, for example, tinpo:g';ly, tinpo:go 'go eat' could have developed from •tinay po:gay and •tino po:go. An earlier history in which the compound imperative was an FSV imperative would help account for the unusual property exhibited by these words in the sentences in (13-15), where the first member of the compound apparently enters into syntactic phrases with other words, independently of the second member. Note that the truncation analysis does require a difference in the operation of the rule in the case of the two putative former FSVs: the entire syllable /gay, go/ is deleted during Vl truncation to form the current FSV imperative, but only the last vowel /';ly, of is deleted during Vl truncation to form the current compound imperative. The difference can be accounted for by formulating the truncation rule so that it applies only to the suffix, leaving the root intact. Blocking mechanisms that prevent changes in the root, while allowing them in other parts of the word, are well-known to phonologists, and several phonological theories include ways to handle such phenomena, e.g. the use of the morpheme boundary in early generative phonology (Chomsky and Halle 1968), level ordering in Lexical Phonology (Mohanan

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

67

1986), root-faithfulness constraiots in Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995), and multiple levels once again in Stratal OT (Kiparsky 2007).

6. Conclusion

Although FSVs (other than those created by echo-word reduplication) have been lost in other modern South Dravidian languages, two constructions are present in Betta Kurumba, albeit in a highly restricted manner. One of them, the FSV imperative, was described in this paper, with a discussion of its form and function and of its historical development. The paper argued that this FSV is most likely an independent innovation in this language. Thus, although the functional motivation Steever suggested for the overall decline ofFSVs in the Dravidian language family is, I believe, a valuable insight into the phenomena, the fact that Betta Kurumba has innovated two new FSVs shows that monoclausal multiple finite verb constructions can and do reemerge in this family. The paper suggested that the re-emergence of the FSV in this case has its own functional motivation. That is, the overall tendency for South Asian languages to form complex verbs rather than new simple verbs exhibited itself in this case in the form of two finite verbs specifically because the purpose of the FSV is to encode two directives, rather than merely two facets of a complex event. Since the illocutionary act of a request or command is typically encoded on the finite verb in Dravidian languages, this complex verb necessarily marks imperative mood on both the verbs, rendering both formally finite. If mood was marked on only one verb, the multi-faceted nature of the event (comprising the performance of an act, as well as movement and directionality) would be conveyed, but not the combined illocutionary force of two directives. The paper described, in addition, a second complex imperative that has developed in Betta Kurumba, the compound imperative. It provided an account of the likely changes that led to the formal structure of the FSV imperative and the compound imperative, arguing that there must have been an earlier stage in the language in which the two complex imperatives consisted of two verbs identically marked for politeness and number agreement; i.e. there must have been a more polite form that had polite imperative markers on both verbs, and a less polite form that had nonpolite imperative markers on both verbs. A truncation change must have affected the VI of

68

Gail Coelho

both the complex imperative constructions, resulting in their present structure as an FSV imperative in one case, and a compound imperative in the other case. The truncation rule also affected simplex polite imperatives, giving rise to a new politeness category of casual imperatives. The fact that truncation affected single finite verbs as well as the VI of the FSV is responsible for the fact that both verbs in the FSV imperative continue to bear finite verb marking, in contrast to Kanda, where a similar rule of truncation resulted in a VI that does not match any finite verb with comparable function in the language.

Notes

•

I.

2.

3.

An earlier version of a part of this paper was presented at the 26., South Asian Languages Analysis Rouodtable, held at Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, in December 2006. I am grateful to the audience at that conference for their responses to that paper, and also to Sanford Steever for his very useful comments on the present paper. A handful of finite serial verbs have been reported in South Asian languages of other families: Hook says that ''pair verbs" are fouod in the South Muoda language, Gorum (Aze 1972, cited in Hook [2001:110]), the Tibeto-Bunnan language, Lirobu (Weidert and Subba 1985, cited in Hook [2001:110]), and in Middle Indo-Aryan in Apabhramsha (Hook 2012). He uses the term ''pair verbs" for verb sequences in which both are "fully inflected for the tease and show agreement in person, geoder, and number with the subject of the sentence". They are also reported in Urdu (Schmidt 2003), Magahi (Verma 2003) and Gujarati (Cardona and Suthar 2003). Betta Kurumba is spokeo by an adivasi community living in the Western Ghats in an area that stretches from Coorg and Mysore distticts in Kamataka, goes through Wayanad disttict and a portion of Mallapuram disttict in Kerala, and extends up to the western portion of Nilgiris disttict in Tamil Nadu. The language has beeo desctibed in Jayapall979 and Coelho 2003- the data for my work on the language consists of fonnally elicited seoteoces and texts (descriptive narratives and folktales) that I recorded and transcribed during my field work with Betta Kurumba speakers living within Nilgiris disttict. Of the many Betta Kurumbas I worked with, I am particularly grateful to Kirbuuji (Bommi) and her daughter-in-law, Badsi (Saraswati), for their patient cooperation as my primary native speaker consultants. The history of the negative FSV was discussed in Coelho 2011, and will be the focus of a forthcoming paper.

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

69

When /if-final roots occur with the singular imperative suffix, this form conveys a sense of urgency or impatience. The Betta Kurumba verb cao be divided into the derivational level aod the inflectional level, based on differences in the suffixal structure of each level aod differences in phonological behavior (described in detail in Coelho 2003). Within the derivational level there are two types of suffixes: One type consists of suffixes with lexical meanings; e.g. -isu 'causativizer', -o:g 'V and go, V thoroughly'. The term "derived stern" is used here solely to refer to sterns containing root + derivational suffixes of this type. The other type consists of ''theme formatives", which are used in forming realis aod irrealis themes. These theme formatives are reflexes ofProto-Dravidiao past aod nonpast tense markers. In Betta Kurumba, they are used in categories that bear no semaotic relationship to the relevaot tense; therefore, I label them realis aod irrealis theme formatives. Abbreviations used in this paper are: ACP = accompaoying event, c =casual, COMPL = completive, COND = conditional, DAT = dative, EMP = emphatic, EXCL = exclusive, FUT = future, GEN = genitive, IMP = imperative, INDF = indefinite,IRF = irrealis theme fonnative,r.oc = locative, M = masculine, N = neuter, NEG = negative, NOM = nominative, NP = nonpolite, NPST = nonpast, OPT = optative, PL = plural, PRS.PRF = present perfect, PST = past, RF = realis theme formative, sBJV = subjunctive, so = singular, TPE = truncated personal ending. In addition, certain root altemaots are tagged with a subscript: ~ = root altemaot used in polite imperative, n = root altemaot used in the special realis theme, • = root alternaot used in the realis theme. Finally, the symbol '+' indicates a compound juncture,'=' indicates a derivational juncture, aod '-' ao inflectional juncture. Watam, a Papuao laoguage, has ao interesting case of a binary serial verb being marked differently for negation from a ternary serial verb, as described in Foley 2010. The two SVCs refer to methods of killing; ao example of the binary form is rutki-minik 'slash-die' aod of the ternary one is rutki-yak-minik 'slasbcut.open-die'. To negate the binary form, ba- is prefixed to the first verb aod -tapl-rap is suffixed to the second verb. For the ternary form, ba- is prefixed to the first verb as well as the last verb, the latter also receiving the suffix. Foley (2010:87) says about them: ''While both types may be monoclausal, the relations that hold among the verbs in the two types may not be the same, aod the difference, we would argue, resides in the event relations. In the binary SVCs we have a straightforward expression for a causing event aod its intended overall stereotypical result. But in the ternary SVC ... we have two causing actions ... aod it is clearly the effect of the second action which results in the death". The difference in event relations is reflected in the different manner of marking negation on the two serial verbs. To avoid confusion between the use of the same symbol, a single asterisk, for ungrannuatical forms as well as reconstructed forms, I use a double asterisk for the former aod a singular asterisk for the latter.

70

Gail Coelho

9.

The final vowels of words are frequently omitted in fast speech, which is why niya and erganu surface as ni: and ergan. When the example contains such words, its morpheme gloss shows the full form of the word or morpheme. The voiced alveolar stop [d] shown in ki:dl is an allophone of alveolar tap /r/the transcription used in this paper is phonemic in all respects, except that I retain the two allophones [d, r], rather than use the underlying phoneme /r/. The allophone [d] occurs only next to an alveolar consonant, while [r] occurs only elsewhere. Betta Kurumba has retained the Prato-Dravidian contrast between dental, alveolar, and retroflex stops in the voiceless series (It t, tl), but, like Proto-Dravidian and modern Dravidian languages, the voiced series contains only lrJ, c(f. Note that in morphophonological alternations, such as the one shown in the special realis theme in (1), /r/ functions as the alveolar counterpart of /c(f, and its allophone [d] occurs if an alveolar-initial suffix is attached to a root ending in /r/; e.g. no:q- nayr surfaces as [ n~yr] in [ n~yrag~y] 'look! (polite imperative)', but as [n~yd] in [n~ydnact.~c:l~] /n~yr-onact.-~«:1~/ 'have looked'. It is generally accepted that a defining characteristic of serial verbs is that they are monoclausal (see e.g. Aikhenvald and Dixon 2006; Comrie 1995 (cited in Foley 2010); Amberber et al. 2010). See e.g. Shibatani 1988 and Li 1990 for discussions of such compounds in Japanese and Chinese respectively, and e.g. Spencer and Zwicky 2001 [1998] and Lieber and Stekauer 2011 [2009] for different approaches taken in various morphological theories to the problem of whether to locate compound word formation in the morphological module or the syntactic module, or both. For all examples from Steever 1988, I have retained the transcriptions used by the author, but have changed the abbreviations and format for the morpheme glosses to make them consistent with this paper. Amritavalli and Jayaseelan's (2005) claim that agreement, although not mood, can be considered a reflex of indicative mood is interesting because it suggests that Agreement-copying in these other Dravidian languages bears a closer resemblance to the FSV imperative than it seems at first (also see Amritavalli 2000, 2004 for earlier formulations of this idea). Spears (1992) describes another monoclausal verb sequence involving come found in an African-American dialect of English. However, the motion verb is used in these to express speaker indignation and not motion; e.g. She come going in my room- didn't knock or nothing (Spears 1992:854). Incidentally, a discussion of serial verbs involving motion verbs is also found in Nordlinger (2010:238-239), where the author shows that the motion verb encodes directionality when used with another motion verb, but when used with a non-motion verb, it "encodes the sequential motion event 'go/come and VERB"'. Since serial verbs involving motion verbs are present in so many verb serializing languages, I do not attempt to cite all the relevant literature on this issue.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

The re-emergence offinite serial verbs in South Dravidian

71

16. I do not agree with Dixon and Aikhenvald that the go/come V constructions are not serial verbs on the grounds that this grammatical technique is not used extensively in English. Inextensive use of this construction is not sufficient reason to exclude it from the ambit of verb serialization, in my opinion. Like Foley, I consider verb serialization to be simply a way of creating complex verbs, much like compounding and such morpheme-creating processes as reduplication. As Foley (201 0: 107) says, serial verbs "are a number of different things that simply look alike structurally, but on deeper probing tum out to exhibit very divergent properties ... Are there any universal defining properties of [serial verbs]? Probably not, although the term may still prove useful as a convenient descriptive label like reduplication". The terms ''reduplication" or "compounding" are labels applied to certain methods of producing new lexical or grammatical items, and they are applied as labels regardless of whether or not the method in question is used extensively in the relevant language. 17. Note that English has a similar construction, come/go and V, whose inflectional possibilities differ from the come/go V construction. As Pullum (1990: 222) states, in come/go and V "inflection is allowed provided both verbs represent the same form of the paradigm, whereas in [come/go V constructions], no inflection at all is allowed, matching or not." Two of his examples are I went and got the paper and Going and getting the paper is not my job. He provides several syotactic arguments for why the come/go V form should not "be analysed as simply the [come/go and V form] with its coordinating conjunction elided" (p. 226).

References Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and Robert M. W. Dixon 2006 Serial verb constructions in typological perspective. In Serial verb Constructions, Alexandra Y. Aihenvald and Robert M. W. Dixon (eds. ), 1-67. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amberber, Mengistu, Brett Baker, and Mark Harvey (eds.) 2010 Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amritavalli, R. 2000 Kannada Clause Structure. In The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Language and Linguistics, Rajendra Singh (ed.), 11-30. New Delhi: Sage Publications. 2004 Some developments in the functional architecture of the Kannada clause. In Clause Structure in South Asian languages. Veneeta Dayal andAnoop Mahajan (eds.), 13-38. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

72 Gail Coelho

Amritavalli, R. and K. A. Jayalaseelan 2005 Finiteness and negation in Dmvidian. In The O:iford Handbook of Comparative Syntax, Guglielmo Cinque and RichardS. Kayoe (eds.), 178-220. New York: Oxford University Press. Andres, Susie 1977 A description of Muria Gondi phonology and morphology with a transformatiooal account of the morphophonological processes employed. Ph.D. diss., Deccan College, Poona. Aze, F. R. Clause pattern in Parengi-Gorum. In Patterns in Clause, Sentence, 1973 and Discourse in Selected Languages of India and Nepal, R. L. Trail (ed.), 235-312. Norman: SIL Burrow, Thomas and S. Bhattacharya 1953 The Parji language: A Dravidian language of Bastar. Hertford: Stephen Austin and Sons. 1970 The Pengo language: Grammar, Texts, and Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cardona, George and Babu Suthar 2003 Gujamti. In The Indo-Aryan languages, George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain (eds.), 659-- bag) (alternation A); the alveolar sibilant Is/ randomly substitutes its palatal counterpart IS/ if the latter is immediately followed by another alveolar obstruent (e.g. {SantraS} 'terror' + {to} ~ SOntrOsto 'terrified') (alternation B); A consonant cluster in onset, e.g./ski in /skull is preceded by an epenthtic vowel: /iskul/ (alternation C). A and C apply across the board whereas B is context-sensitive. For example in /haSto/ 'used to laugh ' derived from the root /haS/ the palatal IS/ does not change to an alveolar Is/. In this article, we will analyze these three alternations in the light offour different models ofphonology:i) Sound Pattern of English, ii) Generative Phonotactics, iii) Natural Phonology and iv) Optimatlity theory, in order to see which model can offer the best account of the phonology of a language. 1. Preliminaries In this article we will analyze three different alternations in Bengali mani-

fested in the following four words: /bag/ 'tiger', /SOntrOsto/ 'terrified', /hasto/ 'used to laugh' and /iskul/ 'school' in the light of four different models of phonology of our time: i) Sound Pattern ofEnglish, ii) Generative Phonotactics, iii) Natural Phonology and iv) Optimatlity theory, in order to see which model(s) can offer the best account of them. As it will be clear from the examples below, by alternation we mean particular phonic change(s) manifested in the surface structure of a linguistic construct as compared to its underlying structure (see Dube for details on the true nature of alternations)

80 Shishir Bhattacharja

Alternation A: /bagh/ 'tiger' ---t bag In (A), aspirated obstruents (lbh/, /db!, /gh/, etc.) are categorically replaced with their unaspirated counterparts (fbi, ldl, lgl, etc.) in coda;

Alternation B: {SOntraS} 'terror'+ {to} ---t SOntrOsto 'terrified' In (B), the alveolar sibilant /s/ randomly substitutes its palatal counterpart IS/ if the latter is immediately followed by an alveolar obstruent.

Alternation C: /skull 'school' ---t /iskull In (C), an epenthetic vowel precedes consonant clusters in onset.' We note that (A) and (C) apply across the board whereas (B) has exceptions. For example, in /haSto/ 'used to laugh' derived from the root /haS/ palatal /S/ does not change to alveolar /s/.

2. Sound Pattern of English (A) and (B) can be handled with (1) and (2) in the light ofS(ound) P(attem) ofE(nglish) (elaborated in Chomsky and Halle 1968). In (1) the context must be word boundary (#) because aspiration may not be lost in morpheme boundary(+): {bagh}+{er} = /bagher/ 'of the tiger'. As SPE would handle both (A) and (B) in phonology, it is unclear how this model can account for the exceptions of (B). A disjunctive principle (cf. Stampe 1979:52) like Elsewhere condition Ia Panini may be an easy way out in such cases, but it does not tell us why (2) does not apply to words like /haSto/ 'used to laugh'.

a

(1)

[+ aspirated] ---t [- aspirated] I-# Example: lbagh/ ---t !bag/; /labh/ 'profit' ---t /lab/

(2)

[+sibilant,+ palatal] ---t [+sibilant,+ alveolar] I+-[+ alveolar] Example: {binnaS} 'arrangement'+ {to} ---t binnOsto 'arranged'

It is unclear how (C) can be handled in SPE unless it can accommodate syllable boundary. We note that SPE does not even mention that a phonological unit like syllable could exist.' However, if one accommodates the notion of syllable in a SPE kind of description, he should be able to account for (C) with an ad hoc rule like (3).

Three alternations in Bengali

(3)

81

[+ consonantal] [+ strident, +consonantal] {[+vocalic, +high] [+ vocalic, - high]} ---) {[+ vocalic, + high] [+ vocalic, - high]} [+ consonantal] [+ strident, +consonantal] {[+ vocalic, + high] [+ vocalic][- high]} /-Onset Example: /skull---) /iskul/;/skart/ 'skirt' ---) !EskarT/; /sparS/ 'touch' (Sanskrit)---) !EspOrSo/

Although the three alternations mentioned above can be handled in SPE more or less satisfactorily, the main problem lies in the fact that a phonological descripiton a Ia SPE does not tell us why the aspiration is lost in word-final position, or why a word-initial consonant cluster must be preceded by an epenthetic vowel, or why alternations like (B) do not apply accross the board.

3. Natural Phonology According to N(atural) P(honology) (elaborated in Stampe 1979, Donegan and Stampe 1979) particular segment or sequences cannot surface in particular (syllabic/word) positions due to some uoiversal constraints caused by physical limitations of our vocal organ. If such segment or sequences happen to appear in some underlying structure, they are made pronounceable through 'phonetically motivated' processes (cf. Donegan and Stampe 1979:145). For example, according to Stampe (1979:3) human beings have physical limitations for maintaining aspiration or voicing in coda (cf. Stampe 1979:3) because i) Syllabication is restricted by the condition that sonority must increase from onset to rhyme and decrease from rhyme to coda; ii) Aspirated or voiced plosives are relatively difficult to articulate because, according to Stampe (1979:2), ''their characteristic obstruction of the nose and mouth impedes the air stream on which the glottal vibration of voicing depends." If some underlying structure happens to have a voiced phoneme in coda, then, as Stampe (1979: 147) claims, "There is a phonological process which avoids this difficulty simply by substitutiog voiceless stups for voiced." For

82 Shishir Bhattacharja

example, devoicing of final obstruent is a natural process (of lenition) because, as Donegan and Stampe (1979:132) state, "speakers of many languages which lack final obstruents devoice these when they are pronounced in foreign loanword" and also because (133) "there are no languages in which all final obstruents are voiced but many in which they are all voiceless, e.g. Vietnamese." Hence, a Vietnamese speaker usually pronounces the English word /bag/ as /bak/ devoicing the syllable final voiced obstruents although closed syllables are nonexistent in the sound pattern of Vietnamese. Similarly, in (A), a phonological process (oflenition) substitutes unaspirated plosives (/b/, /gl, etc.) for aspirated ones (/bhl, /gh/, etc.). No Bengali speaker needs to learn how to deaspirate an obstruent in coda. Similarly, the process does the whole job when a German speaker pronounces /rad/ 'state' as /rat/ or a Vietnamese speaker pronounces the English word /bag/ as /bak/. When a child acquires/learns a language he learns how to violate some of these constraints, i.e. how to constrain the process. According to Donegan and Stampe (1979:147) "It is not the process, but constraints on the process, which must be acquired." Hence, a child learning Bengali must learn how to violate the process of devoicing in coda in words like /rOb/ 'sound', /rOd/ 'lake' or /rag/ 'anger'. A phonological description of Bengali does not need to mention the fact that aspiration is lost in coda, but it must mention which processes are violated by speaker-hearers either categorically, or in particular contexts if the grammar or the lexicon obliges them to do so. We shall now move onto the alternation (B). In (B) (/binnOsto/ or /SOntrOsto/), the speaker-hearer does nothing, but as far as its excepetions are concerned (e.g. !haSto/ and /bOSto/ 'used to sit'), he violates/constrains the process of lenition. A Bengali speaker must remember the particular morphological contexts in which he has to violate the process of alveolarization. We said 'morphological' because the process is not violated in non-derived words like /mOsto/ 'big', /mastan/ 'hooligan', /mastnl/ 'mast', etc. According to Donegan and Stampe (1979:127) Natural phonology properly excludes the topic of unmotivated and morphologically motivated alternations. Although these have often been lumped together with natural alternations in generative phonology, they should be excluded from phonology if it can, in principle, furnish no understanding of them.

Therefore, in the light of NP, one can exclude (B) from the domain of phonology and say that it will be handled elsewhere, probably in morphology with some word formation rules (see section 4).

Three alternations in Bengali

83

We have stated above that in (B) the underlying sequence /St/ becomes

1st/ through regressive assimilation to ease pronunciation. But the same ease could have been achieved if the sequence was replaced by /Sc/ through progressive assimilation. One may ask, quite reasonably, why Bengali prefers one type of assimilation to the other. In what follows we will try to answer this question in light ofNP. Crosslinguistically, inter-syllabic assimilations may be either progressive or regressive. Particular languages may also involve both of them for different features. For example, Vedic and Sanskrit involved regressive voicing (cf. Macdonelll916 andPanini'sAstaddhyayi 8:2:39 inKatre 1989) (e.g. /bak/ 'speech' + /devil 'goddess' ~ /bagdevi/ 'muse/goddess of speech, knowledge and all sorts of arts'). However, Sanskrit verbals like (;/iS+ta>) /iSTal 'desired' or ('lkRS+ta>) !kRSTa/ 'ploughed' (cf. Whitney 1885:9 and 23) point to the fact that Sanskrit also involved progressive 'retroflexisation'. Bengali categorically involves regressive assimilation. We see in (4-5) that /p/ and /k/ are substituted by /b/ and /g/ because they are followed by a [+voice] segment. On the other hand, /c/ in (6) does not become /j/ despite the fact that it is preceded by a [+voice] segment /g/. 'water/~

(4)

/golap/ 'rose'+ /jOl/

/golabjOl/ 'rose water'

(5)

/bak/ 'speech' + /juddho/

(6)

/bhag/ 'division' + /caSi! 'cultivator' */bhagjashi! 'sharecropper'

'battle'~

/bagjuddho/ 'debate' ~

/bhagcaSi! and not

According to Donegan and Stampe (1979:139) "Each process is sensitive to a number of different hierarchical constraints on its application" and also to the economy of physical effort, as Stampe (1979:47) states: "Individual processes make minimal substitntions". Donegan and Stampe 1979:129) state that "Stops are easier to produce than spirants, which require a more controlled approximation of the articulator" If we take this as valid, then /St/ is easier to produce as compared to /Sc/. Similarly in (A), the [+ aspirate, +voice] /gh/ is substitnted with [- aspirate, + voice] /g/ and not with [- aspirate, - voice] /k/ because the latter will require two different featural changes. In (B), /SOntrOsto/ requires one single featural change: [+ Palatal] > [+ alveolar] whereas */SOntrOSco/ would require more than one change: i) [+palatal]> [+alveolar], and ii) [+ occlusive]>[+ continuant].

84 Shishir Bhattacharja

We shall now move on to analyze alternation (C) in the light of NP. Crosslinguistically, there must be a constraint on consonant cluster in onset. Such syllables are made pronounceable in Bengali through epenthesis. Hence, /skull 'school' surfaces as /iskul/ or /spOrSo/'touch' as /EspOrSo/. Native speakers of (the Standard dialect of) English learn how to violate (C) and so do some Bilingual Bengali speakers. For those who cannot manage to learn it, the process of fortition: epenthesis and/or disyllabification apply automatically. Some speakers pronounce /skull as /iSkull, because, probably, the alveolar /sf which is preceded by the palatal vowel /il undergoes the process of palatalization. Therefore, the output /iSkul/ results from two different processes: i) Epenthesis and ii) Palatalization. Whenever possible, all processes apply all at the same time. However, depending on the language and the context, processes may also apply consecutively. Donegan and Stampe (1979:145) state that "Processes may be optional (variable) or obligatory." If we take this as valid, then, (A) and (C) would be obligatory processes whereas (B) would be an optional one because it does not apply accross the board. 3

4. Generative Phonotactics For G(enerative) P(honotactic) (elaborated in Singh 1984, 1990), phonology consists of two things: i) A Phonological alphabet (no matter how it is represented, as list of phonemes or as combination of features) and

ii) A list ofW(ell) F(ormedness) C(ondition)s like (7). As Singh (1990:156) states, "La phonologie d'une langue se reduit a son alphabet phonologique (quelque soit la f~on dont on le represente) et a ses conditions de bonne formation. "(The phonology of a language reduces to its phonetic alphabet (no matter how it is represented) and its WFCs). (Tr. is mine). 7. *Coda [+ consonantal, + Aspirated] Phonology a 1a GP needs only two levels of representation: an Wlderlying one (the input) and a surface one (the output). The input or the Wlderlying form of a

Three alternations in Bengali

85

sequence may or may not be pronounceable in a language, but no output can violate any WFC. If an underlying structure of a word or a loan word happens to violate a WFC, the phonology of the language must repair or alter the sequences with three hierarchically arranged universal strategies of repair. i. Substitution/Assimilation > ii. Epenthesis > iii. Deletion According to Singh (1984:274) there is a universal principle which says that Violations of WFCs must be repaired and that they are preferably repaired (= removed or alleviated) by finding a phonotactically acceptable substitute from the same class as the degenerate boundary segment (rather than, say, changing the prosodic structure of the string under consideration). Therefore, as Singh (1984:276) expresses it, "epenthesis is not to be even tried if assimilation would do" because, according to Shibatani (1973:104) "bringing in a new segment costs more than dealing with already existing segments in the underlying representation." Whenever a sequence violates the relevant WFC, the most adequate strategy of repair is triggered automatically and without exception. Strategies of repair are spread on a universal and/or language specific scale of preference based on a criterion of simplicity (cf. Desrochers 1994) consisting in the principles: i) Structure preservation (the strategy must preserve most of the phonological identity of the input sequence) and

ii) Minimum modification (the strategy must involve the least of the modifications (a) in the existing feature values and (b) in the structure of the constituents.

In (A), /bagh/ violates (7) and therefore, it is repaired with substitution (gh>g). For GP, (A) and (C) should be handled in phonology whereas (B) and its exceptions should be handled in mmphology with Word formation strategies like (8) and (9) each licensed by a set of semantically related word-pairs that manifest the same contrast in their formal structure as well as in their categorical affiliation.

86 Shishir Bhattacharja

8. /XaS/Nmm~ /X.Osto/Adjective /SOntraS/ 'terror' ~ /SOntrOsto/ 'terrified' /binnaS/ 'arrangement'~ /binnOsto/ 'arranged' 9· /XS/v.m, 3nl perwon, [mpen.tive ~ /X.Sto/Verb, 3nl perwon, Habitual Put /haS/ 'laugh' ~ lhaSto/ 'used to laugh' /bhalobaS/ 'love'~ /bhalobaSto/ 'used to love'

In (C), the underlying structure of /skull violates (1 0), and the structure is repaired with epenthesis. We note that different languages choose different mechanisms of repair. For example, in Panjabi, /skull is repaired as /sokul/ with epenthesis in a different syllabic position. In Warlpiri, the same sequence is repaired as /kull because i) the phonemic alphabet of W arlpiri lacks fricatives and ii) no Warlpiri word can start with a vowel. 10. *Onset

c

c

[+strident]

Although GP correctly accounts for the facts in Bengali a phonological description aIa GP does not tell us, unlike a description a Ia NP, why the obstruents in Bengali must be deaspirated in coda, or why (unlike in German) voiced obstruents are not devoiced in the same position. S. Optimality Theory

O(ptimality) T(heory) (elaborated in Kager 1999, McCarthy 2001 among others) presumes that all languages have three basic components: i) CON which is an universal set of hierarchically arranged/ordered list of violable constraints, ii) GEN which generates the list of possible outputs or eligible candidates and ii) EVAL which evaluates the candidates and selects the optimal one. Differences between grammars reflect different rankings of the constraints. Acquisition of phonology can thus be described as a process of adjusting the ranking of the constraints. The candidate that violates the least number of high ranked constraints is selected as the optimal candidate. For example, in (11), candidate (3) /bag/ is the optimal candidate because it violates only one lower ranked constraint. Similarly in (12), candidate (1) /SOntrOsto/ is the optimal candidate because it violates only one lower ranked constraint.

Three alternations in Bengali 87

Optimal candidate

o-

1 2 3 4 5

(11) Input or Underlying structure: lbagh/ List of Const-1 Const-l Const-3 Const-4 cadidates MaxiO DepiO No Asp Min Coda FChange lbagh/ *! /bak/ * /bag/ lbal *! /bagho/ *!

Const-5

FaithC

* * * *

Const: Constraint; MaxiO: No deletion; DepiO: No epenthesis; No Asp Coda: No aspiration in coda; Min FChange: Minimal featural change; FaithC: Same consonants in the input and the output.

Optimal candidate o-

1 2 3 4

(12) Input or the underlying structure : /SOntrasSto/ Const-1 Const-:Z Const-3 List of cadidates MaxiO Obl No ProgReg-Assim Assim SOntrOsto SOntrOsto * SOntrOsto *! SOntrOsto * *

Const-4

FaithC

* * *

Obi Reg-assim: Obligatory regressive assimilation; No Prog-assim: No progressive assimilation.

In ( 13) candidate ( 1) /haSto/ is the optimal candidate despite the fact that it violates a high ranking constraint. On the other hand, although candidate (2) has violated only one low ranking constraint it has not been selected as the optimal candidate. Hence, as with SPE, B is problematic for OT.

Optimal candidate o-

1 2 3 4

(13) Input or the underlying structure : /SOntrasSto/ List of Const-1 Const-:Z Const-3 cadidates MaxiO Obl No ProgReg-Assim Assim haS to *! hasto hato *! haSco *

Const-4

FaithC

* * *

88

Shishir Bhattacharja

In (14) there are two optimal candidates ((1) and (5)) which violate the same constraints.

Optimal candidate o-

1 2 3 4

o-

5

(14) Input or the underlying structure: /skuV List of Const-1 Const-l Const-3 cadidates DepiO MaxiO NoGem

iskul sul k:ul skul iSkul

* *! *!

Const-4

FaithC

* *

* * *

*

NoGem: No gemination

Apart from the fact that (B) is difficult to handle in OT this model has the same drawback as SPE and GP, which lies in the fact that all these models are basically distributional in nature. They are distributional in the sense that they consider a construct optimal or acceptable exclusively on the basis of the distribution of the facts of the language in question. In other words, according to these models A becomes B in the context of C only because the data in question do not manifest the contrary. NP, on the other hand, allows us to find out the (natural) reason(s) behind all types of alternations.

6. Conclusions Competing theories differ, according to Singh (1996), on three questions that are not necessarily interrelated: i) Representation, ii) Mechanism and iii) Domain. All the four models presented above make use of the same representation: Distinctive features. Although SPE and OT involve different mechanisms they agree on the question of domain- (A), (B) and (C) must be handled in phonology. On the other hand, both NP and GP exclude (B) from phonology. We have seen that (B) is not easy to handle in either SPE or OT, whereas it can be satisfactorily handled in NP and GP. We also note that unlike the three other models, NP explains the raison d'etre of all types of alternations, and hence, in our view, only this model offers both descriptive and explanatory adequacy.

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Acknowledgement I am grateful to late Professor Rajendra Singh for his thought provoking comments and suggestions. I thank Somdev Kar for his comments on an earlier version of this article. I specially thank my senior colleague Dr. Dil Afroze Quader who had read several earlier versions of this article and tightened up my prose. U sua! disclaimers apply. For fmancial support during research as well as the presentation of earlier versions of this work in 2009-10, I gratefully acknowledge the beneficence of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, while for logistic support, I am indebted to the National Institote for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo, Japan.

Notes

• I.

2. 3.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 6th North American Phonology conference, University of Concordia, Montreal, 28-30 April, 2010. In some cases the choice of the epenthetic vowel seems to depend on the nucleus of the syllable in question. For example, in /EspOrSo/ (3), marking on the verb for the direct relations of the participants, marking antidative and the neutralization of the 'direct' marker and tense markers in the negative constructions. Tumbanhang (2007) deals with Chhathare Limbu spoken in Dhankuta district of eastern N epa!. This is an attempt to present its descriptive grammar focusing on its sociolinguistic situation, phonology and morphosyntax.

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In his doctoral dissertation Wilde (2008) analyses the phonology and grammar of two dialects of the Rajbanshi language as spoken in Jhapa, Nepal. The analysis is primarily based on a corpus of oral narrative text which was recorded and transcribed from three informants from north-east Jhapa. For the most part the phonology follows the Indo-Aryan pattern. Derivational morphology, compounding, reduplication, echo formation and onomatopoeic constructions are considered, as well as number, noun classes, pronouns, case and postpositions. In verbal morphology causative stems, the copula, primary and secondary agreement, tense, aspect, mood, auxiliary constructions and non-finite forms are covered, in addition to a variety of conjunct and compound verbs. Various particles and clitics are also considered. The syntactic structures studied include: non-declarative speech acts, constituent order, negation, subordination, coordination and valence adjustment. Tense variation in narrative discourse is studied in the final chapter. Doomenbal (2009) provides a comprehensive overview of the grammar ofBantawa, a Kiranti (Rai) language spoken in Eastern Nepal. Bantawa is an SOY language featuring rich verbal morphology. In Bantawa we find both ergative and accusative alignment patterns in verbal affix agreement, and an ergative I absolutive pattern of case marking. The grammar treats the syntax of all major syntactical constructions, including the highly productive verb compounding process, embedding of converbial and finite clauses, nominalisations and evidentiality. The semantics of nominalisations and the aspectual nuances of verbal compounds are discussed in detail. An annotated text corpus, comprehensive paradigm tables and a glossary complete the grammar. A Sketch Grammar ofYohlmo (2010), written by Anna Maria Hari, is a brief study of the most salient features of Yholmo, a minor Tibeto-Burman language? spoken in Nepal. This sketch grammar, written within the framework of typological-functional approach in analysis, mainly consists of 5 sections dealing with its background, phonology, inflectional and derivational morphology, verb morphology, word formation and syntax. It may serve as a model for describing several minor preliterate dying languages. In his dissertation Dhaka! (2011) deals with the phonology, morphology, syntax, pragmatic phenomena, and typological features of Darai, an endangered Indo-Aryan language. Based on phonological and morphosyntactic features, Darai has been sub-classified as an 'eastern' Indo-Aryan language closely related to Bhojpuri, Maithili as well as Majhi. Split ergativity based on nominal hierarchy, dative subject agreement, packaging of agent and

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patient in the transitive and ditransitive verb, and productive clause combining strategies are some features characterized in this language. In Rai eta!. 2011 a grammar of Chintang Kirant-Rai language has been presented along with its dictionary. In Chamling Vyakaran (20 11) Rai tries to describe the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. Kansakar et a!. (20 11) is a descriptive grammar of Baram, a seriously endangered language.

2. Lexicography During this period (2005-11) there appeared a large number of dictionaries for Nepal's languages. Most of these dictionaries are on minority languages with preliterate traditions. They include Jirel (Strahm and Maibaum 2005), Chamling (Rai et a!. 2007), Magar {Bhudharnagar 2008), Byansi {Bohara 2008), Puma (Rai et a!. 2009), Rajbanshi (Wong 2009), Magar (Dhoot) (Thapa 2009), Yholmo (Hari and Lama 2004), Limbu (Chemjong and Kainla 20 I 0 3"' edition), Sherpa (Sherpa 20 I 0), Chintang (Rai et a!. 20 I 0 and 2011 ), Dumi (Rai 2011), Sherpa (Sherpa 2010) and Baram {Kansakar eta!. 2011). These dictionaries are generally multilingual prepared using Toolbox, a software developed by SIL International. Each of them consists of three parts: I. Mother tongue-Nepali-English dictionary, II. Nepali-Mother tongue glossary, and III. English-Mother tongue glossary. They have been compiled for use in basic education, adult literacy and translation works. In addition, Prajna Nepali Sabdakosh, a standard monolingual dictionary of Nepali compiled by Nepal Academy, has been substantially revised in keeping with the democratic changes in Nepal and published in 2011 (2067 Vikram Era). Nepal Academy has also been working on preparing NepaliEnglish bilingual dictionary for facilitating translation and English-speaking learners of Nepali. Similarly, a multilingual dictionary ofMaithili, Nepal's second largest language, is in progress. This is Maithili-Nepali-English dictionary with Nepali-Maithili and English-Maithili glossaries and is being designed to help Maithili-speaking learners of Nepali and English and also translators.

3. Language documentation This documentation, supported by Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) at SOAS, University of London (2007- 2011), has

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recently been completed with significant contributions such as development of a fully annotated and analyzed audio-visual corpora of 32 hours' duration, which has served as a vital resource for compiling Baram-Nepali-English Dictionary (Kansakar eta!. 2011) with its Nepali-Baram and English-Baram indices and A Grammar ofBaram (Kansakar eta!. 2011). Other major contributions of this documentation include development of basic reading materials for Baram children and Baram Sanskriti ('Baram Culture', Bhadra). The sociolinguistic study of the Baram language has appeared in Himalayan Linguistics (Kansakar eta!. 2011). 4. Natural language processing

4.1. Corpus and lexical resources in Nepal Setting aside the basic initiatives started earlier than 2005, development of corpora and lexical resources started in earnest with the EU-funded Nepali Language Resources and Localization for Education and Communication (NELRaLEC, called Bhashasanchar in Nepali) project (2005-7). The most significant contribution of this project is the construction of the 14-millionword Nepali Natioual Corpus (NNC). This corpus includes both spoken and written data, the latter incorporating a Nepali match for FLOB and a broader collection of text. Additional resources within the NNC include parallel data (English-Nepali and Nepali-English) and a speech corpus. The NNC is encoded as Unicode text and marked up in CBS-compatible XML. The whole corpus is also annotated with part-of-speech tags (See Y adava et a!. (2008) for details). Hardie eta!. (2009) deals with the process of devising a tagset and retraining tagger for the Nepali language, for which there existed no corpus resources. More recently, Hardie et a!. (20 11) deals with the extension of automated text and corpus annotation in Nepali from POS tags to lemmatisation, enabling a more complex set of corpus-based searches and analyses. This approach to tokenisation and lemmatisation may be conducive for analyzing other Himalayan languages with Nepali-like morpholo-gical behavior. One of the important applications of NNC is the development of the online Contemporary Dictionary of Nepali (the first corpus-based dictionary of the language) Nepali TTS (developed using the framework of Festival Speech Synthesis System) and the launch of courses in corpus and computational linguistics at Tribhuvan University. The dictionary contains about 7000 lexical entries and requires further elaboration. NNC is being used by linguists as a resource in grammatical research as well.

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4.2. PAN localization Another measure in natural language processing is the PAN Localization Project, Phase I (2004-2007) and Phase (2007-2009) wherein much work has been accomplished under the Software Localization and Natural Language Processing fronts in N epa!. These include N epaLinux a completely localized Linux distribution into Nepali and other Nepali language . utilities like the Nepali Spell checker' Thesaurus' Nepali Computational processmg Grnmmar. Analyzer and corresponding tools (Tokenizer, Parts of Speech (POS) Tagger, Chunker, Parser etc.). In addition to these applications, lOOK words from the PENN Treebank corpus has been translated into Nepali and POS tagged as well. 4.3. Machine translation The third project in this sphere is the machine translation project "Dobhase" completed in 2006 with support from the PAN ICT R&D Grants Program for developing an online Machine Translation system for English to Nepali translation, which has been hosted online and has been accessible freely. The online-machine translation system is capable of taking General English text as input and generating a corresponding Nepali text as output, thus conveying the meaning of the source text in English by representing it in Nepali. However, as with many other machine translation systems, the resnlt needs post-editingto make it more natural (Yadava eta!. 2005). Besides, this system, based on a limited lexicon, needs its further enhancement and also for its replacement by using parallel corpora. 5. Organizations To boost up natural language processing in South Asian countries including N epa! there have been established two organizations. One of them is South Asia Association of Language Processing (SAALP). Constituted in Colombo with Sarmad Hussain as its chair in 2007, SAALP aims to promote natural language processing (NLP) for South Asian languages and hold interactions among the experts of this region and elsewhere. Another organization is Language Technology Kendra (LTK) set up in 2010. This Kendra is a consortium of three organizations- Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP), Tribhuvan University (TU) Central Department of

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Linguistics (CDL) and Kathmandu University (KU) Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DoCSE) with equal standings and a not-for-profit and non-profit sharing company. It covers a wide range of technologies which enable the communication in languages using the former as a tool. Some of the examples of these technologies include - localized software interfaces, keyboard input software, spell checkers, dictionaries and thesauri, grammar checkers, machine translation systems, text-to-speech software etc. LTK develops software of social values and long term impacts like the machine translation software, spell checkers, text-to-speech, etc. Its resources can be broadly classified as the following: i)

Domain experts - NLP (Machine Translation, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics), Speech Technologies, Localization, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics

ii) Applications and software: NepaLinux, Nepali Text-to-Speech, Spell checker for Nepali, Dobhase Machine Translation System, Nepali corpus-based Dictionary software etc. iii) Linguistic resources - Written corpora (monolingual, parallel), Speech corpora etc. LTK is unique in the sense that it is a collaborative effort of the academia and the industry in such as scale for the first time in the history ofNepa!. The team members of LTK are already renowned for their contributions to the society in their respective fields. Most of all it is a not-for-profit and nonprofit sharing company working with a larger focus on language technologies. 6. Linguistic survey of N epa! (LinSoN)

Linguistic Survey of N epa! (LinSoN), launched in 2008 with support of National Planning Commission, Government of Nepal, aims to develop a sociolinguistic profile of all the languages ofNepal, produce a basic description of at least ten languages, develop and maintain a complete database of the languages of Nepal, and finally, develop a description of the use of mother tongues in education. To accomplish these tasks various goalspecific trainings and workshops were organized for researchers in its initial

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phase. They were later followed up by field trips to various language clusters. There have beeu so far collected data on the sociolinguistic situation of Nepali, Maithili, Newar, Lapcha, Jirel, Chepang, Santhali, Kaike, Bote and so on. These data, partially entered in computer database, are in the process of being analyzed and presented in reports. Besides, mother tonguebased textbooks have also been developed for some of these languages. The primary outcome of LinSuN is to lay a foundation that provides for the linguistic rights of the citizens of Nepal so that all her people, regardless of linguistic background, will be included in the overall fabric of the nation. By better understanding the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Nepalese people, it is hoped that no community will be excluded from the activities of the nation because of language, and that each language community will be given a foundation for long term language development. The Survey will continue for seven years and include Sociolinguistic Surveys, Language Documentations, Literacy, and Archiving.

7. Multilingual education Like other South Asian nations, Nepal is home to great linguistic diversity (Yadava 2008). This diversity, however, poses a serious challenge to children with diverse settings. In this context World Education Forum in Dakar was held in 2000 "to ensure that by 2015 all children, particularly girls and children from ethnic minorities, have access to complete free and compulsory primary education of good quality". To achieve this goal and make education equitable and accessible to children with different linguistic backgrounds it was deemed essential to introduce education mainly through the medium of their mother tongues. "Since effective teaching depends on clear and understandable communication, the language of instruction is at the heart of any learning process. For this reason, mother tongue-based instruction is crucial to providing children with early access to education and to enabling them to participate in learning processes according to their evolving capacities" (Shaeffer 2007). Besides achieving quality education, multilingual education (MLE) is also necessary for helping children's cognitive development, reducing their high repetition and drop-out rates, strengthening their self-confidence, and so forth. With the global realization of the advantages of mother tongue-based multilingual education Nepal has also introduced it in children's education. Recently, constitutional and statutory provisions such as Interim Cons-

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titution of Nepal (2007), National Education for All (EFA) Programme (2009-15), School Sector Reform Programme (SSRP) (2009-15), Multilingual Education Implementation Guidelines (2010), etc. have been made to support MLE in the country. The bilingual education programme for nonNepali speaking students (2006-8) at Ministry of Education with technical support from Government of Finland has been a major step in implementing MLE in Nepalese schools. Curriculum Development Centre has so far developed curricula and textbooks in 19 mother tongues as optional subjects while NCED has been conducting trainings and workshops to school mother tongue teachers. UNESCO has been assisting in creating awareness about MLE-related issues through organizing conferences and workshops and making reading materials available in local languages. With a view to regulating the MLE-related issues it was felt necessary to establish a resource centre. Multilingual Education Resource Centre (MLERC) has been set up by CERID, Tribhuvan University with support from Ministry of Education, UNESCO, and MLE-interested academics and institutions from Nepal and abroad. The Centre is an essential outcome of the recent ongoing MLE debates and activities undertaken in the country. It envisages to regulate the MLE provisions and mobilize additional resources for the effective implementation of the MLE plans and strategies. It may help in bringing uniformity in implementing MLE strategies through its central and local agencies on an institutional basis. In its initial phase the MLERC intends to cater for: 1. Establishing the Multilingual Education Resource Centre at CERID, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur; 2. Developing MLE bibliography; 3. Collecting MLE-related materials and setting up an MLE library; 4. Publishing an MLE Newsletter; 5. Translating and adapting Advocacy Kit for Promoting Multilingual Education: Including the Excluded into A vadhi language and 6. Forming an MLE advisory committee.

8. Journals Himalayan Linguistics is an online peer-reviewed bi-annual journal specializing in languages of the Himalayan region. It has been publishing articles, book reviews, book notices and field reports in the semi-annual issues of

102 Yogendra P. Yadava various journals. It has also published grammars, dictionaries, and text collections as free-standing publications in its "Archive" series. Himalayan Linguistics has recently published its volume I 0.1 as a Special Issue dedicated to the memory of two well-known and well-respected colleagues in the field of Himalayan linguistics: Michael ('Mickey') Noonan and David Watters. Mickey passed away on February 23, 2009 and David passed away on May 18, 2009. These two men dedicated the greater portion of their academic careers, and their lives, to research and scholarship on languages of the greater Himalayan region. They also contributed greatly to typological and theoretical discussions in the broader field of linguistics. The volume contains a brief introduction that outlines the careers of each man, in addition to a complete list of their publications. There are thirteen articles written with reference to the two scholars and their work. These treat a variety of subjects including historical-comparative Tibeto-Burman, historical, grammatical, and phonological studies of particular languages, patterns of language use, prosody, tone, orthography, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. The volume also includes a field report on plural marking in Dolpo Tibtan and a book review of Chelliah and DeReuse's new handbook oflinguistic fieldwork. Another journal is Nepalese Linguistics often annually published by Linguistic Society of Nepal (LSN), regularly organizing its annual conferences on November 26 and 27 every year since its inception in 1978; all its 27 volumes in PDF format have been hosted and made accessible online by Digital Himalaya. The LSN has been serving as a vibrant forum for disseminating linguistic research on Nepal's languages by native as well as foreign linguists. The conference papers embrace almost all linguistic areas including theoretical and applied linguistics, natural language processing, and so on.

9. Ethnologue reviewing The Ethnologue is published every four years by SIL International, giving a brief description of each IS0-639 identified language. SIL has been working in collaboration with the Central Department of Linguistics of Tribhuvan University to review and update the language entries and maps for each of the Ethnologue's 126 entries for Nepal (as listed in the 16th edition; Lewis ed. 2009 ). Danraj Regmi (CDL Chair), Yogendra Y adava, and John Eppele (SIL Consultant to CDL) have served as regional editors for the effort, work-

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ing closely with M. Paul Lewis (Ethuologue Edilor) and Irene Tucker (Fellow of the British Carlographic Society and chief carlographer for SIL). Data review forms were returned by foreign and Nepali linguists and then received peer review during a series of meetings held in Kathmandu. The Linguistic Survey ofNepal (LinSuN, a project of the CDL) and SIL are working lowards publishing a bilingual English-Nepali version of the Ethuologue entries and maps for Nepal. This volume will serve as a helpful resource for those involved in language planning and development. 10. Language policy

As an outcome of the Andolan II, Nepal's language policy has metamorphosed into a pluralistic one. Part 1, Article 5 of Interim Constitution ofNepal (2007) makes the following provisions for languages: ( 1) All the languages spoken as the mother longue in N epa! are the national languages ofNepal. (2) The Nepali Language in Devanagari script shall be the official language. (3) Notwithstanding anything contained in clause (2), it shall not be deemed to have hindered to use the mother language in local bodies and offices. State shall translate the languages so used to an official. Despite all these liberal provisions, Nepali alone has so far been used as official language for all practical purposes. Quite recently, Committee for Determining the Basis for Cultural and Social Solidarity at the Constituent Assembly has recommended for using Nepali as an official language for the time being and exploring other alternative languages in central, provincial and local government offices after the implementation of the new constitution through the fonnation of the Language Commission.

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Acknowledgement

For providing their prompt support in preparing this report I would like to thank Carol Genetti, Jean Opgenort, Christopher Wilde, Marius Doornabal, Danraj Regrni, Dubi Nand Dhaka!, and several other colleagues.

References Bohara, Gopal Singh and Balaram Prasai 2008 Byansi (Rang)-Nepali-English dictionary. Kathmandu: Gopal Singh

Bohara. Budhamagar, Kama Bahadur Magar-Nepali dictionary, Kathmandu: Nepal Magar Association 2008 Chemjong Imansingh and Bairgi Kainla Limbu-Nepali-English Dictionary Third edition. Kathmandu: Nepal 2010 Academy. Contemporary Dictionary ofNepali (Online version) Doomenbal, Marins A. 2009 A Grammar ofBantawa, Paradigm tables, Glossary and Texts ofa Rai Language ofEastern Nepal. LOT: Utrecht. Government of Nepal. 2007 Interim Constitution ofNepal. Kathmandu: GoN National Education for All (EFA) Programme (2009-15). Kathmandu: 2004 GoN. School Sector Reform Programme (SSRP) (2009-15). Kathmandu: 2009 GoN. Multilingual Education Implementation Guidelines. Kathmandu: 2010 GoN. Hardie, Andrew, RamR Lohani and YogendraP. Yadava Extending corpus annotation ofNepali: Advances in tokenization and 2011 lemmatization. Himalayan Linguistics 10:1 Hardie, Andrew, Lohani, RR, Regmi, BR, and Yadava, YP 2009 A morphosyntactic categorisation scheme for the automated ana1yais ofNepali. In: Singh, R. (ed.) Annual Review ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics 2009. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hari, Anna Maria and Lama, Chhegu Yohlmo-Nepali-English Dictionary. Kathmandu: Central Depart-ment 2004 of Linguistics, TU. Hari, Anna Maria 2004 A Sketch Grammar of Yohlmo. Kathmandu: Central Department of Linguistics, TU. Kansakar, Tej R, Yogendra P. Yadava, Krishna Chalise, Dubi Nand Dhaka! and Krishna Poude1

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A Grammar ofBaram.Kathmandu: Central Department of linguistics, TU. Baram-Nepali-English Dictionary. Kathmandu: Central Department oflinguistics, TU. Baram Primers J-3.Kathmandu: Central Department of linguistics, TU. A sociolinguistic study of the Baram language, Himalayan Linguistics voliO.l In memory of Michael Noonan and David Watters, 187-226.

Santa Barbara: University of Califomea. Lewis, M. Paul (ed.) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: 2009 SIL International (Online version). Nepal Prajna Prathisthan 2011 Prajna Nepali Sabdakosh Revised edition. Kathmandu: Nepal Prajna Prathisthan. Opgenort, Jean Robert A Grammar of Wambule. Grammar, Lexicon, Texts and Cultural 2004 Survey of a Kiranti Tribe of Eastern Nepal. Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region, 2. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. A Grammar of Jero (With a Historical Comparative Study of the 2005 Kiranti Languages). Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region, 3. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill. Rai, Novel K., Yogendra PrasadYadava, Balrarn Prasai and Krisbna Parajuli (eds.) Recent Issues in Nepalese Linguistics. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society 2007 of Nepal. Rai, v.s 2011 Chamling Vyakoran. Kathmandu: Kirat Chamling Rai Shabdakosh tatha Vyakaran Nurrnan Mul Samiti Rai, Netra Mani et a!. 2011 Dumi-Nepali-English Dictionary. Kathmandu: Dumi Kirat Rai Funsikim. Rai N.K., eta!. 2010 Chintang Dictionary and Grammar. Kathmandu: Chintang-PumaDocurnentation Project. Rai, v.s. eta!. 2009 Puma-Nepa/i-Agreji Shabdakosh tatha Vyakoran. Kathamdnu: Kirat Puma Rai Tupkhabankhala. Regmi, Dan Raj The Bhujel Language. Ph.D. dissertation, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. 2007 Sherpa, Gelu (ed.) Sherpa-English-Nepa/i dictionary. Kathmandu: Sherpa Association of 2010 Nepal.

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Strahm, Esther and Anta Maibaum 2005 Jirel-Nepali-English dictionary. Kathmandu: CNAS Thapa, Hirasingh 2009 Magar (Dhut)-Khas-English dictionary. Kathmandu: Nepal Magar Association. Tumbabang, G. B. 2007 A Descriptive Grammar of Chhathare Limbu. Ph.D. Dissertation, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur. Watters, David E. (With participation of Y ogendra P. Y adava, Madhav P. Pokharel and Balaram Prasai). 2005 Notes on Kusunda Grammar (with David Watters and others). Kathmandu: NFDIN. Wilde, Christopher Pekka 2008 A Sketch of the Phonology and Grammar ofRajbanshi. PhD dissertation. Publications of the Department of General Lingnistics, University ofHelsinki, 43. Wong, Curtis.Y.L. 2009 A Concise Lexicon ofRajbanshi. Kathmandu: NNLPI Y adava, Yogendra Prasad 2008 Raising from a tensed clause and linguistic theory: Evidence from Maithili. In Linguistic Theory and South Asian Languages: Essays in honour of K. A. Jayaseelan, Bayer, Josef, Tanmoy Bhattacharya and M.T. Hany Babu (eds.), 143-159. Y adava, Yogendra Prasad, Govinda Bhattarai and Bhim Regmi (eds.) 2005 Contemporary Issues in Nepalese Linguistics. Kathmandu: Linguistic Society of Nepal Y.P. Yadava, G R Bhattarai, S. K. Bista, B. Keshari andJ. Bhatta 2005 Envisioning Machine Translation for the New Millennium: Outlines of Preliminary Steps in Nepal. In Contemporary Issues in Nepalese Linguistics, Yogendra P. Yadava eta!. (eds.), 429-439, Kathmandu: Linguistics Society of Nepal. Yadava, Y.P., A. Hardie, R.R. Lohani, B.N. Regmi, S. Gurung, A. Gurung, T. McEnery, J. Allwood and P. Hall. 2008 Construction and annotation of a corpus of contemporary Nepali. Corpora 3(2): 213-225.

Reviews

Tariq Rahman From Hindi to Urdu: A social and political history 2011, Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi. 456 pages, ISBN 978-8-12504-248-8, Rs.695

Reviewed by Rama Kant Agnihotri When Agnihotri (2001, 2002, 2002a), following Rai (1984) and various others, claimed that Hindi and Urdu have shared ancestry, Trivedi (2004) dismissed it as mere 'nostalgia', saying ''Nostalgia, is nothing if not highly selective and utopian." (p. 269). Tariq Rahman's monumental work emphatically demonstrates that there lived for centuries a common people who shared a composite culture and a language, a language which was later to become a social and political site for identity formations leading to such associated labels as India-Hindus-Hindu-Hindi, Pakistan-Muslims-IslamUrdu. The book also shows that this seemingly naive linear equation between a people, a region, their religion and their language and script is actually highly complex in its evolution. Rahman shows how the Persianized Urdu variety written in the Perso-Arabic script of the shared Hindustani came to dominate the domains of judiciary, general employment, education, print, radio and screen (Chapters 9 to 14). It is instructive to quote at some length from his last chapter 'Conclusion' (Chapter 15). There was, he says, "a certain Indian language stretching all the way from Peshawar to the border of the Bengal before the Turkish invasion of the subcontinent in the eleventh century" (p. 389); it came to be called Hindvi and the variety spoken around Delhi assimilated most words not only from soldiers but also merchants, religious figures, mystics, mendicants and camp followers. Till the end of the 18th century, it was still called Hindi or Rekhta when the elite of the imperial cities of Agra and Delhi started owning and patronising the sociolect that was highly Persianized which ''they called Zubaan-ee-Urduu-ee-Muallaa the language of the Exalted City, i.e. Delhi. In time this long descriptive phrase shrunk to Urdu." (p. 390). Rahman's painstaking analysis leads him to conclude ''that even now- after about two hundred years of separation and drifting apart- spoken Urdu and Hindi are the same language." (p. 399). The opening sentence of his 'Introduction' (Chapter 1) is no different: "From the thirteenth till the end of the eighteenth century the name of the language we

110 Rama Kant Agnihotri

now call Urdu was mostly Hindi." (p.l). Rahman quotes Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) to show that even though each region in India had its own distinct language, "it is Hindi since ancient times which is used ordinarily for all kinds of conversation." (p.l8). Linguists have of course always known that except for some minor phonological differences, so-called Urdu and Hindi are similar syntactically and morphologically. It took Rahman five years to finish this project; the severe paucity of grants only added to his problems. The project took him not only to the major cities of Pakistan but also to many libraries and people in India, England, France and Germany; in the process he learnt Persian and Devanagari script and needed to get several works in Chaghtai, Turkish, French and German translated. The result is a scholarly book which must be read by all those interested in the complex network of relationships among politics, language and script in general and issues surrounding the Hindi-Urdu debate in particular. Rahman's primary agenda is to show how a shared idiom can for political, ideological and religious reasons constitute a contested site for creating two different nations and two different languages. Nations struggling to be born and establish their unique identity need sharply defined markers; symbols such as a constitution, a national flag, an anthem, a currency etc will follow in due course but some symbols to underscore the very raison d'etre for separate nations are inunediately required, particularly in the case of a huge sub-continent where generations of people had lived together, often with intense levels of intimacy. The formation of Pakistan required the assertion of fundamentalist Islam and Persianized Urdu; that of India ritualistic Hinduism and Sanskritized Hindi, both trying hard to distance themselves from the shared idiom of Hindustani. The diversity of shared linguistic and cultural practices suddenly gave way to rigid compartments of monolithic identities where the question - how do you wish to be counted? - became central. "When the Indians experienced the census, they found that the category 'Mahomedan' (Muslim) could be disempowered or empowered, impoverished or enriched, deprived or benefited, depending on a number of factors out of which the only ones they understood were numbers and loyalty to the rulers. This game of numbers created the perception of a monolithic Muslim community..." (p.l2). The Hindu 'Other' was held together by Hinduism and Hindi. Education, textbooks, newspapers and magazines and eventually dictionaries and grammars in separate scripts and idiom finally sealed the boundaries between Hindi and Urdu.

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The second, third and the fourth chapters devoted respectively to 'Names', 'Age' and 'Origins and Historiography' emphatically establish the shared origins of Hindi and Urdu. In the chapter on 'Names', Rahman provides an instructive table (pp. 21-22) which lists different names associated with Hindi/Urdu such as Hindi (13th century), Dehlavi (13th-14th century), Hindvi/Hindui (13th-19th century), Gujri (15th century), Dakkani/ Dakhni (15th-18th century), Indostan (17th-18th century), Moors (18th century), Hindustani (18th-20th century), Rekhta (18th-19th century) and Urdu (18th century), providing their respective regional associations and ideological biases. He discusses each name in detail showing how Hindi or Hindvi is the common ancestor of both Hindi and Urdu. He also shows why the popular story about Urdu originating in military camps is fundamentally flawed since the language commonly used at that time was neither a pidgin nor a creole. "The theory which is most credible is that there was a base language, call it Hindi for convenience, spoken in pre-Muslim India which was a fully developed language in its own right." (p.20). Ra1unan quotes from Amir Khusrau, Sheikh Bajan, Shirani, Sheikh Burhanuddin Janum, Khub Mohanunad Chisti, Mohammad Qutab among others to substantiate his point. It was only the British who could not/did not wish to appreciate the historicity and dignity of a composite culture and helped consolidate separate Hindu and Muslim identities associating them with Hindi and Urdu. "In short, the British perception of the distinct identities of Hindus and Muslims helped to associate language with religion weakening the perception that a composite language could be shared between the two communities." (p.37). The separation of the two styles today has reached a point that in the formal domains they have become nearly mutually incomprehensible. Not only that speakers of Hindustani feel alienated in the worlds of Hindi and Urdu but as Rai (200 1) says, speakers of Hindustani dread 'school Hindi' and "from being native users, free to invent and be creative, they have been 'secondlanguaged', disabled, rendered alien." (p.105). Annexure-A/2 (p.53) of Census figures during 1911-1981 at the end of Chapter 2 shows how language identities fluctuate between Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani depending on political situation. Consider the figures for Madhya Pradesh (Central India). Hindi was claimed by 7, 651, 334 speakers in 1921; the decades that followed were dominated by Urdu. In 1931, the figure for Hindi fell to 2, 868, 538 but the figures for Urdu rose from 374, 424 in 1921 to 751, 775 in 1931. The Indian sub-continent was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947. In 1951, the figure for Hindi rose to 21, 686, 140 and for Urdu it fell to 368,

112 Rama Kant Agnihotri 233. Hindustani was claimed only by 28, 907 speakers in 1921; the number rose to stunning 4, 990, 345 in 1931 butfell to a mere 59, 381 in 1951 and to only 1084 in 1961. Hindustani, the mother of Hindi/ Urdu, was finally erased. The fifth and sixth chapters are concerned with the 'Islamization of Urdu' and 'Urdu as an Islamic Language' respectively showing how a shared language in popular use since the 13th centory at least was indexed differently through "scripts, allusions, idiom, rhetorical devices, and formulaic expressions" (p. 98) for standardising Urdu and Hindi and for associating Urdu with Islam and Hindi with Hinduism. The process began with the Urdu elite during the 18th and early 19th centory to purge Hindustani of its Sanskrit and Prakrit lexicon and expressions, replacing them by stylised borrowings from Persian and Arabic and it was later followed by a political reaction from the Hindus pulling the same language in the direction of extreme Sanskritization. "These language-planning processes led to the splitting of a language (Hindi-Urdu) into modern Persianized and Arabicized Urdu at one extreme and modem Sanskritized Hindi at the other. Between the two ends is a continuum which veers towards one end or the other according to the speaker, the occasion and the environment." (p.99). Rahman's work is of course focussed on the growth of elitist Urdu created by such scholars as Nizami, Ansari and Wajhi; as in the case of all RPs, there was an exaggerated focus on a certain idiom, pronunciation and diction in Urdu and it soon became the monopoly of a few elite families around Delhi. The climax of this process may be seen in Azad's famous history of Urdu literature which ignores Hindu poets - "the dice was loaded against them as Urdu had been standardized from the eighteenth centory onwards to become an identity symbol ofNorth Indian Muslim males ..." (p.130). The reaction to assert a corresponding Hindi-Hindu identity may be seen in Acharya Ramchandra Shukla ( 1883-1941) in for example his book Hindi sahitya ka itihas (History of Hindi Literature), published in 1929: It is my opinion that Hindi and Urdu are two very different languages. The Hindus ofthis country speak Hindi, while Muslims and those Hindus who have studied Persian speak Urdu. Sanskrit words abound in Hindi as Arabic and Persian words abound in Urdu. There is no necessity to use Arabic and Persian words in speaking Hindi, nor do I call that language Hindi, which is filled with Persian and Arabic words. (Shukla, 1929, quoted in King, 1994, p. 23)

In a debate (available at http: //www. urdustudies. cornlpdf/20/12 AminRai. pdf) among Alok Rai, Shahid Arnin and Palash Krishna Mehrotra centred

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around Rai (200 1), Alok Rai regrets the hypocrisy and violence written into official Hindi; he feels that this language unless it sheds its baggage of purism, is unable to ask any serious academic or political questions. In terms of religion also, the assertion of Urdu as a distinct language meant the suppression of folk ways of religious and cultural life that were shared by the Hindus and Muslims. ''The Deobandi interpretation of Islam, which is strict and puritanical, goes against the saint-ridden, folk Islam of ordinary Indian Muslims." (p.l48). Urdu started playing a major role in education, learning Quran in maktabs and in celebrating traditional Islam and in both, it was supported by the British rulers. In South Asia, Urdu became the dominant language of Islam. The highest number of translations of the Quran; "Islamic textbooks associated with teaching in the madrassas; the highest number of elegies commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain; the writings of revivalists and Islamic pressure groups in Paksitan and several other sub-genres of religious writings" (p.l57) were all available only in Urdu. In due course, it would become associated with voices against Christianity too. Yet even today, ''the common peoples' language in the streets ofDelhi and Karachi are mutually intelligible" (p.133) though high varieties of Urdu and Hindi have become almost mutually incomprehensible. It is slightly unfortunate that Rahman regards, along with the British and the reformist movements both in Islam and Hinduism, Urdu poetry typically associated with love, romance and eroticism. There is no doubt that this perception was wide-spread and like other languages including say Braj, there is an element of the erotic in Urdu literature. However, I think it was the outcome of Victorian prudery largely (and later of course the compulsions of creating 'morally' superior separate nations) that forced people to ignore the philosophical and spiritual aspects of Urdu poetry. The distinguished and authentic tradition created by Sauda, Dard, Mir, Zauk, Nasir, Momin and Ghalib was not just romantic in character. The poetry of Sauda, Dard and Mir "gave Urdu maturity and class. Poets had now developed selfconfidence to claim having done better than the best and the highest in Persian which still occupied the position of the official language of the State." (Zaidi 1993: 127). And Ghalib had the vision and conceptual clarity to imbue ghaza1 ''with an all-embracing content, not only the love-lorn, intensively introspective element but also the philosophical, social and cultural sweep of human emotions and aspirations or the extrovert element condensed to saturation." (Zaidi 1993:185). It is also not clear what Rahman could possibly mean by describing the 11th century language spread from Peshawar to Bengal as being an unstan-

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dardized, pre-modem language which was just a "collection of mutually intelligible dialects." (p. 389). How else could one describe any language in the II th century when there was no printing press and no dictionaries and no B.B.C. The last fifty six pages of the book are very useful. They are devoted to a 'Glossary', a 'Bibliography' with five sections and an 'Index'. The glossary provides informative glosses about the Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Panjabi terms used frequently in the book. Five sections of the bibliography concern 1) Reports, Official Documents and Unpublished Theses 2) Manuscripts and Letters etc. 3) Books and Articles in Oriental Languages 4) Books and Articles in Western Languages and 5) Interviews, Websites, Personal Communications and Internet Sites. The copyeditor and the Orient BlackSwan team deserve our praise for a near flawless production except occasional typos such as on p. 287 (line 10) where 'then' is printed instead of 'than'.

References Agnihotri, Rama Kant 1998 Sociolioguistics: Awaiting adulthood. In Studies in Indian sociolinguistics, R. S. Gupta and Kailash S. Aggarwal (eds.), 17-29. New Delhi: Creative Books. 2001 Half the battle and a quarter (Central Institute of Indian Languages Foundation Day Lectures). Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. 2002a A pre-partition partition: The case of Hiodi and Urdu. In Pangs of partition. Vol. II, S. Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta (eds.), 29--46. New Delhi: ICHR and Manohar. 2002b Sociolioguistic theory and practice: The Indian counterpoiot. In The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 11-26. New Delhi: Sage Publication. King, Robert C. 1994 One language, two scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Rshman, Tariq 1996 Language and Politics in Pakistan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rai, Alok 2001 Hindi Nationalism. Delhi: Orient Longman.

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A house divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi!Hindavi.

Delhi: Oxford University Press. Trivedi, Harish 2004 The anxiety of Hindustani. In The Yearbook ofSouth Asian Languages and Linguistics 2004:267-276. New Delhi: Sage Publication. Zaidi, Ali Jawad 1993 A History of Urdu Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Tej K. Bhatia and Kazuhiko Machida The oldest grammar of Hindustani: Content, communication and colonial Legacy Volume 1: Historical and cross-cultural contexts: Grammar corpus and analysis Volume 2: Lexical corpus and analysis [Ketelaar's section 1-45] Volume 3: Ketelaar: Original manuscript [1698 A.D.] 2008. Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo; Volwne I: 188 pages, ISBN 978-4-86337-014-2; Volume 2: 218 pages, ISBN 978-4-86337-015-9; Volume 3: 77 pages, ISBN 978-4-86337-016-6.

Reviewed by Ghanshyam Sharma In spite of the fact that India had been home to great grammarians and philosophers oflanguage such as Pal)ini, Patafijali and Bhartrhari and despite the fact that the Sanskrit language had a very rich grammatical tradition in ancient times, the Hindi language to a large extent remained unstudied for a long time and was consequently subject to very little grammatical treatment, if any, until the seventeenth century. In fact, for various socio-political and cultural reasons - which require further in-depth research - the Hindi grammatical tradition did not make effective use of the rich heritage of the Sanskrit grammatical tradition and thus was instead destined to be a byproduct of the colonial era which started after the arrival of Europeans in India. In their quest to establish the native theory, some Indian scholars are known to have until very recently devoted their efforts towards establishing that the first Hindi grammar ever written was Mirza Khan in 1676, while opponents of this claim have ignored the grammar's existence altogether. Be that as it may, due to lack of reliable proof the native claim has been widely disputed; and siding with the non-native hypothesis, some scholars have argued that the first ever grammar of Hindi was instead written by a

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European. Nothing other than an authoritative work such as the present one could have shed decisive light on such a controversial issue. Tej K. Bhatia and Kazuhiko Machida (the Authors, hereafter) have not only undertaken an arduous task, they have also been very successful in accomplishing it. Not only have the Authors discovered the manuscript of the first ever grammar of the Hindustani language written in Dutch by J. J. Ketelaar- a German from Elbing on the Baltic Sea (now in Poland) who worked with the Dutch East-India Company in India towards the end of the 17., century- they have critically assessed its possible contribution to future Hindi grammar studies, furnishing Hindi scholars with an invaluable document which doubtlessly opens up a new chapter in the history of Hindi grammars. As said above, the three volume book under review is dedicated to the oldest Hindustani Grammar, written by Ketelaar (claimed to have been completed by 1698). The fust volume includes a survey of the Hindi grammatical tradition by T. K. Bhatia and then presents the grammatical section (parts 46 through 53) of Ketelaar's grammar. The second volume contains Ketelaar's Hindustani lexicon. The thrid volume reproduces the entire original manuscript discovered by the Authors in the archives at The Hague (Algemeen Rijksarchief) - from its microfilm version with a xerox version of the original. The first volume of the book begins with a succinct introduction to the Hindi grammatical tradition (P.1-63) by T. K. Bhatia which in my view is the most important part of this publication. Bhatia has authoritatively presented the historical and cross-cultural contexts of the Hindi grammatical tradition. He has very accurately defined various terms such as Hindi, Hindisustani, Hindavi, Rexta, Urdu which have always been a source of great confusion in the history of Hindi grammar. Pages 63 through 181 are composed of Ketelaar's section 46-53. Ketelaar's sections 46-47 deal with some aspects of Persian grammar whereas sections 48-49 present Hindi conjugation. The rest of the section is dedicated to the analysis of different types of vocabulary and terminology. A careful look at the conjugation tables presented by Ketelaar reveals how difficult it was for a European to rightly transcribe certain peculiar sounds of Hindustani and to establish the 'standard' form of Hindustani spoken in the seventeenth century. Ketelaar was aiming to analyze and present a standard form of lingua franca which was composed of different dialects spoken in a very wide area, starting from Agra, Delhi, Lahore to Lucknow and thus, in my view, cannot be considered similar to modem Khari boli, Bhatia's claim notwithstanding: "In spite of the mixed lexicon, Ketelaar's forms are primarily k?a?f bolf Hindi." (p.50). If

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one looks carefully at the uniflected masculine nouns in the nominal paradigms presented by Ketelaar - for exampledeclension of i)c:r presented by Ketelaar on page 89 - one will have to recognize that the Hindustani Ketelaar had in mind was not in total agreement with what has come to be known as modem standard Hindi, which is derived mainly from Khari boli. Many of the characteristics of Ketelaar' s grammar and variation in his data can be properly understood only through comparison with Hindi dialects other than Khari boli, and I believe that the Authors have failed to recognize the need to carry out such a comparison. Further enquiry into the topic will undoubtedly help us understand how Khari boli was able to tower over the different varieties of Hindustani that were struggling to come into being despite being overshadowed by the influence of local dialects. The second volume of the book entitled "Lexical Corpus and Analysis" deals with sections ( 1-45) of Ketelaar' s grammar and consists of two parts: (I) Lexical corpus [Ketelaar's Original Order] and (In Lexical Corpus [English Alphabetic Order]. Let us look at the first part first. Notice that Ketelaar's manuscript contains two columns only: (I) list of Dutch words (2) their equivalents in Hindi transcribed into Dutch. In order to supplement Ketelaar' s original word lists with phonetic, semantic and etymological details, the Authors have wisely chosen to add seven more columns, making the volume an extremely useful tool for further research. The first column gives the page number of the manuscript while the second indicates the section number. The third column contains Dutch words deciphered from the original by the Authors with the help of native Dutch speakers. In the fourth column the Authors provide English translations of the Dutch words. In the fifth column the Authors provide Hindustfuli words as deciphered and transliterated into Dutch with the help of Dutch speakers. The sixth column contains the Hindi target word, in Devanagari, as the perceived form of the original Hindustani words transliterated into Dutch. In the seventh column the authors have chosen to transliterate the Hindi target forms. In the eighth column the Authors have provided etymological and cultural notes and finally, in the ninth column they have chosen to provide a Persian equivalent. Although the Authors have critically analyzed the corpus and meticulously provided all the relevant information to evaluate Ketelaar' s original lists of Hindustani words, I have found the fifth column incomplete in that what is needed here is not only the Hindustfuli word written in Dutch, but also its exact pronunciation transcribed in IPA, preferably with the help of a Dutch speaker. On the other hand, the Authors could have eliminated the seventh

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column, as it only contains a transliteration of the Hindi target form. For example, I fmd the information about schwa deletion in Hindi - which is not marked acurately everywhere (see, for example, the transliterated form 'qal? mat?riis?' on page 44 which should instead be 'qalam?tariis?') - totally superfluous in the present volume. Furthermore, the transliteration does not always adhere to Authors' own transliteration principles, as outlined in the chart on page iii. See, for example, ba?dUq? p. 50, ndra?gf [nara?ji] p.61 and na?ga p.74 which according to the Authors' own scheme should be transliterated as bandUq?, ndra?gf [ndra?ji], na?ga, respectively. Similarly, I find the Hindi target forms provided in the sixth column misleading. For example, on page 43 for the Dutch word 'pack' (English 'pack') the Authors have furnished modem standard Hindi form ·~· as the target form. But most of the Hindi dialects Ketelaar is known to have come into contact with have •;rii'o• or •;i[ot't• which are exactly what Ketelaar had in mind to transcribe through Dutch spelling. Similarly, for the Dutch word 'handmeule' (English 'Hand mill') on page 47, most of the Hindi dialects spoken in Hindi area have ·~·, as transcribed by Ketelaar and not the Hindi target form · · · , as suggested by the Authors. In a similar vein, the Hindi dialects have •"fflsr• for the Dutch word 'zuijker riett' (English 'sugarcane') on page 54, as transcribed by Ketelaar, not the Hindi target form '7lif