Light verbs in Hindi.

Abstract

Light verbs (LVs) can be defined as a group of grammatical verbs that are semantically bleached, which means that they have lost some of their lexical content. While light verbs are found in many languages throughout the world, a study of the South Asian language Hindi reveals a wealth of light verbs of various types. Syntactically, the light verb category (v) in transitive sentences is considered to have a causal feature that is responsible for the thematic licensing of the so-called ‘external’ agent argument (Hale and Keyser 1993; Chomsky 1995). Previous studies of Hindi light verbs have shown that they can appear in the forms N+V, A+V and V+V , (Mohanan 1991, 2006; Kachru 2006). In addition, light verbs have been assumed to be responsible for hosting tense and aspect features, licensing arguments, and functioning as auxiliaries. I argue that there are four LV categories in Hindi: conjunct LV, compound LV, permissive LV, passive LV. Due to the variety of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Hindi and the diversity of situations in which they are used, the Minimalist definition of the LV, which only assumes a single category, v, is inadequate to account for all types of LVs at a cross-linguistic level. The presence of multiple light verbs that can co-occur in a single sentence is evidence that there are several light verb categories or verbal extended projections within the syntactic architecture that need to be investigated. In this dissertation, I provide a syntactic account of LVCs in Hindi by classifying the different types of light verbs according to their functions and morphological properties. In addition, I postulate an expanded syntactic representation, the v Domain, that includes all four light verbs in Hindi as extended v projections within the vP. This assumption is guided by the theoretical framework of Cartography, which investigates the presence of detailed syntactic configurations within the current Minimalist architecture, see Cinque and Rizzi (2008).