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This paper is an attempt to present the morphological processes that have been observed in Sanzari Boro, an eastern variety of the Boro language. Boro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The Standard variety of Boro is mainly spoken in the present Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) of Assam, India but Sanzari Boro speakers primarily reside outside and eastern part of the BTR. For this research data have been collected from native Sanzari Boro speakers of the Nagaon district of Assam. After examining the data, it has been noticed that affixation, mainly suffixation and prefixation, plays important role in the morphological processes in Sanzari Boro. The major morphological processes that have been observed in the language variety are inflection, derivation, compounding, and reduplication.

This study proposes to investigate the functions of morphosemantic in Meetei proverbs, particularly the attribution of different meanings of the lexical items in Meetei Proverbial verbs. Meetei society has been using proverbs in the all ages, stages of development, social changes, and cultural diversifications to mark their wisdom of social expertise. Meetei used proverbs as an important aspect of verbal discourses within the socio-cultural and ethno-civilization contexts in which skills, knowledge, ideas, emotion, and experiences are communicating. The language used in proverbs reflects the Meetei's status of life, food habits, belief systems, philosophy, cultural and social orientations. At the same time, various meanings attribute in Meetei proverbs in the forms of figurative, witty, pithy, didactic etc. The construction of these forms are grammatically insightful thereby creating spaces for a whole range of possibilities for investigating the features, functions and structure of verbal inflectional markers occurred in Meetei proverbial sentences.

Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice of switching between a primary and a secondary language or discourse. In this article we are going to investigate code switching in two languages which are considered completely separate in the Language Family Tree. We compared code switching in Persian which is an Indo-European language and Telugu which is a Proto-Dravidian language. A short history of each language will be presented. In spite the fact that Persian and Telugu are from different language family tree, they have some magnificent similar characteristics. We focus on the hypothesis that typologically similar languages follow similar patterns for code-switching. Persian and Telugu have similar syntactic structures. For example, both languages have the same canonical word order as Subject-Object-Verb. One of the most productive structures in both Telugu and Persian language is Light Verb Construction (LVC). Our data in Persian/English and Telugu/English code-switching reveal that bilingual speakers of Persian or Telugu follow similar patterns when code-switching, especially in light verb constructions. In Persian and Telugu bilingual light verb constructions, an L1 light verb or its inflected form is attached to an English noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, or verb. The code switching data used in this study were collected from separate spontaneous conversations involving 10 Iranian students and 13 Telugu students. All were students in postgraduate degree living in Hyderabad, India. A two-hour conversation for each group was recorded and was transcribed by a native Telugu and a native Persian speaker for further analyses. We examine the pattern of code-switching in light verb constructions within the context of other relevant constraints that apply in code switching situations between each language (Persian and Telugu) and English. There are some restrictions in both Persian and Telugu language which will be presented. Based on our observation, these restrictions may be are the result of the typological differences between Persian and Telugu on one hand and English on the other. This idea is in line with recent works on code switching (Mcswann 1999) which state that any correct approach to code switching should look to code switching constraints within the relevant mixed grammars.

The dative alternation refers to the alternation between two constructions that denote some type of transfer: the double object construction ("I give my sister a book") vs. the to-dative construction ("I give a book to my sister"). We examined the motivations behind the dative alternation in Indian English. A corpus study was performed based on a sample of N = 943 sentences that were drawn from the Kolhapur corpus. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of 14 predictors that are known to influence the dative alternation in other macro-regional varieties of English. Three predictors were found to be significant: the sentence verb (modeled as a random intercept), the pronominality of the Recipient and the difference in length between the Recipient and the Theme. Our results further corroborate earlier findings that the to-dative construction is more frequently used in Indian English than in other varieties. We argue that the latter tendency may be associated with a transfer from Hindi. (Contains 8 tables, 2 figures and 4 notes.)

Selective impairments of word-class retrieval skills have been extensively reported in the literature. Such findings posit that the conceptual knowledge is represented in specific categories, with possibly different neural representations. Although there are myriads of such findings in the literature, similar reports are scanty from the Indian context. Against this backdrop, we present two subjects with comparable subcortical lesions and aphasias. Interestingly, one subject showed selective difficulty in retrieving verbs. An attempt is made in this paper to discuss the reason for such a selective verb retrieval deficit in one patient alone and the relevance of probing into such dissociations in the Indian context. Based on our observations, we advocate the incorporation of verb naming task in the routine screening of subjects with brain damage. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

Complex Predicates (CPs hereafter) are abundant in Dravidian Languages spoken in the Southern part of India. A CP is a multi-word expression that acts as one verbal unit where a Light Verb (LV hereafter) plays a vital role (Amberber et al., 2010). LVs, with their syntactic and semantic features and preverbs, determine the argument structure of the whole CP construction. LVs have a distinctive feature of acquiring contextual meanings in combination with the preverbal elements, and this phenomenon is common across language families. (Hook 1991, 1993, Butt 1995). N+LV CPs and Noun Incorporation (NI) structures, which appear to be the same phenomenon, are two different structures altogether, though both have N+V composition. Baker (1988) proposes some defining characteristics for NI structures, which are indeed short for Dravidian languages like Kannada and Telugu, which are highly rich in morpho-syntactic features. According to SK Nadimpalli et al. (2022), additional characteristics exist that can effectively distinguish CPs from NIs. These were demonstrated using Telugu data. The present research concentrates on the difference between NIs and CPs with regard to the argument composition of the whole predicate. The study will also investigate how preverbal nouns in CPs, with specific semantic features, combine with different LVs and how the whole argument structure is composed, with the help of Kannada data as a case in point. The LVs exhibit a wide range of syntactic and semantic properties in consonance with the preverbal noun it combines with to constitute a CP construction. The selection of LVs is inherently language-specific, with LVs in Kannada potentially exhibiting different syntactic and semantic behaviors compared to their counterparts in Telugu. This study, with data from Kannada, would add to the syntactic and semantic repertoire of LVs and N+ LV CPs in Dravidian languages in particular and to the Universal Grammar at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex Predicates (CPs hereafter) are multi-verbal constructions where Light Verbs (LVs hereafter) play a vital role (Alsina et al. 1997). Dravidian languages spoken in the southern part of India abound in CPs. The semantic and syntactic intricacies of LVs reveal a great deal of combinatorial possibilities with other verbal/nonverbal elements with respect to CP constructions in Telugu. Telugu, a language with rich morpho-syntactic features, has abundant CP constructions in which the LVs exhibit various syntactic and semantic behaviors, some of which are particular to Telugu and some universal in nature. Certain LVs in Telugu can even change the transitive value of the lexical verbs they go with and thus impact the argument structure, which in turn affects the semantic content of the whole CP construction. There is a special account of meanings expressed by LVs of Telugu, which in turn contributes to the study of LVs in particular and to the universal grammar at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bodo-Garo group of languages consisting of Kāchārī or Bodo, Lālung (autonym Tiwa), Dīmā-sā, Gārō, Koch, Rābhā, Tipurā (autonym Kokborok), Chutiyā (autonym Deori) and Morān (Grierson 1903) are mainly spoken by about four million people in north-east India. BG exhibit systematic processes of formation of causative verbs through prefixation, suffixation and very rarely, infixation. Lexical causative verbs are also employed in these languages whereas periphrastic causatives are found in the form of verb stacking. This study aims at finding out the causative prefixes which co-occur with the root verbs to form their causative counterparts; categorizing the prefixes in terms of their occurrences with certain roots; and, analyzing the environments and linguistic conditioning of the occurrences of the prefixes. This study also discusses several syntactic and semantic features associated with causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a set of five focus enclitics in Bodo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Assam, India. The focus enclitics are phonologically bound morphemes which are attached to a phrase-level constituent of a sentence, such as the verb, its arguments, or its adjuncts. They all trigger existential presuppositions and express various kinds of semantic and pragmatic relations between the asserted proposition and presuppositions, such as inclusion, exclusion, contrast, concession, and correction. The description of these relations as well as other more context and construction specific functions encoded by the focus enclitics constitutes the core of this paper. This paper also examines the distribution of the focus enclitics and discusses their associated scope and interpretations. Finally, this paper investigates co-occurrence, co-occurrence restrictions, and interpretations of sequences of the enclitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the morphological ergative marking in Monsang, an endangered Northwestern language of the South-Central branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family, spoken in Chandel district of Manipur, India. The paper shows that the A arguments of transitive verbs are obligatorily marked by the ergative marker -íŋ in some contexts and in others only optionally. Factors determining ergative marking include animacy hierarchy, discourse-pragmatic focus and high agency verbs. We also observed that S arguments of unergative verbs can take optional ergative marking when the subordinate clause has the adverbial marker lè 'while/when'. The ergative marker is used for various reasons, such as, to give a reading of agency to inanimate subjects, to place focus on the agent in a discourse, to emphasize the agency of the agent. The results of the study contribute to the description of optional ergative marking in Tibeto-Burman languages in general and South-Central Tibeto-Burman languages in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this issue document argument indexation or verb agreement systems in a set of relatively unknown Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the hills along the eastern border of India. This introduction lays out the goals and scope of the contributions. In addition, an overview of a few topics of particular interest is given: the types of person marker sets found in these languages; number marking; clusivity; transitive and ditransitive indexation patterns; innovative speech-act participant object marking and portmanteau forms for particular person scenarios; inverse marking; and variation in indexation forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The aim of the study was to find out whether children acquire verb naming in early or late childhood and also to find out whether verb naming is stabilized in 5 to 6 years of age children's. Method: The study was based on 50 school going Telugu children among these, 25 children were from 3 to 4 years and again 25 children were from 5 to 6 years. A set of 25 action pictures were used as the stimuli to elicit verb naming in both groups. Results and Discussion: Children have more number of verbal forms compared to nouns. It describes static misnaming, dynamic misnaming, semantically related and unrelated verbs. When we look overall data, we find that the verb "agi vundi" (waiting) was not named at all in 3 to 4-year age group, whereas one child could name it in 5 to 6 year age group. Hence, we can conclude that this was most complex verb for children to comprehend and name. Summary and Conclusion: While acquiring a language, children pass through various stages of developments. Verb develop (1-1.6), 2- Word stage (11/2 - 2yrs), telegraphic speech (2-3yrs) and full competence stage (4 - 5yrs). Present investigator thought it appropriate to explore their development in Telugu speaking children, as there are very few studies on this aspect in Telugu. The present study delves deep into naming of transitive verbs in both groups of Telugu children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Betta Kurumba language of the Kuruma or Kurumba, a large heterogeneous tribe inhabiting principally the Nilgiri area. Topics discussed include the distinctive features of the language such as distinct case suffixes, plural suffixes and innovation of the numeral, the absence gender distinction in third person pronouns and pronominal suffixes, and the presence of link morph -p-.

This paper examines the relationship between the concepts of 'seeing' and 'attempting/trying' in various languages. These concepts have so far been found to be co-lexified in languages spoken in Eurasia, Papua New Guinea, India and West Africa, with an added implicature of politeness present in some languages when this lexical item is used in directives. After establishing a cross-linguistic sample, the paper proposes a specific grammaticalization mechanism as responsible for producing this semantic relationship. The explanation centers on a process involving metaphorical transfer, the loss of semantic features, generalization, and a specific syntactic context conducive to this meaning shift. First, the M ind-as-B ody metaphor is applied to the mind-related notion of 'seeing an object' to derive the body-related notion of 'controlling an object', as has previously been demonstrated to be the case in the history of certain Indo-European languages. Second, semantic bleaching causes the meaning component of physical sight to be lost from the overall meaning of the morpheme, and semantic generalization allows attempted actions to be mentally treated the same as physical objects that are manipulated. Finally, the context in which this meaning shift occurs is posited as constructions involving multiverbs, such as serial verbs or converbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an analysis of verb entries in dictionaries in different Indian languages. The analysis begins from verb entries in the Tamil language. The Tamil dictionary "kriyaavin tarkaalat tamizh akaraati" presents the verb root which is the imperative form of the verb as the entry. The dictionary "Hemkosha: The Assamese-English Dictionary" by H. Barua also provides the verb root as the entry. Meanwhile, "A Santal Dictionary" P. O. by Bodding gives the verb root in Roman transcription.

The article discusses a research study which compared word retrieval abilities for nouns and verbs of young adults and the elderly in India. It describes the subject selection process and the computer software selected to present the experimental stimuli to participants. It is concluded that geriatric participants are slower than the younger group in word retrieval. A chart featuring the average latency time recorded for both groups is also given.

The article presents a comparative analysis of alignment features in two Rajasthani languages, Harauti and Marwari. It mentions that both languages make use of the same form of postposition, and have the same agreement pattern wherein there is verbal ergative in sentences constructed with a perfect finite verb form. It notes that the two languages differ in argument marking pattern, and the postpositional markings have been identified as case marking in relation to Hindi language. Moreover, the use of nai, an argument marker, in Haruati demonstrates that postpositions can function other than inflectional case markers.

The article describes the characteristics of auxiliary verbs in modern Tamil language in India. Auxiliary verbs collocate with other verbs, losing their original semantic and syntactic properties. They always occur after the main verbs. To indicate different grammatical meanings, auxiliary verbs are reduplicated. The auxiliary could be removed from the sentences if the auxiliary verbs occur in compound sentences.

The article discusses the process of verb reduplication in Tamil and Telugu languages in India. It states the similarity between the positive imperative form and verb stem in both languages. It compares the structure of the negative singular imperative forms in Tamil with that of Telugu language. Also noted are the types of non-finite verb forms in Tamil and Telugu.

The first issue of volume 49 of the journal "Info DaF: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache" contains six articles on various topics. Friederike Hinzmann examines the functionality of modal verbs in dissertations. Angelique Hertzel and Tamara Zeyer deal with correction behavior in the digital space. Lesya Skintey presents a study on teacher training students who participate in additional qualification in the field of language education and German as a foreign and second language. Nicole Marx and Katharina Urbann address the situation of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in DaZ (German as a second language) instruction. Rrivu Banerjee examines the willingness of DaF (German as a foreign language) teachers in India to address queer identities in the classroom. Daniela Müller writes about the thematization of sustainability in DaF instruction. The issue also offers the opportunity to submit further contributions. [Extracted from the article]

The expression 'heavy-duty verbs in operation', in fact, refers to 'heavy-duty' verbs which are also operation-words like 'make', 'put', 'take', 'keep', 'let', 'give', 'get', 'go', 'come' and 'do'. The verbs selected for study--'do', 'get', 'give', 'make' and 'take'--are frequently used and are some of the most complex verbs in the English language, as they often do not have any specific meaning of their own; generally, they derive their meaning from the nouns or adjectives that follows them. They are widely used in phrasal and idiomatic expressions in collocation with particles. To provide a definitive description of Indian English collocations of these verbs, the entire one-million word Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English was used as source material. Instances of Indian English data were referred first to the sense definitions given in the corpus-based COBUILD dictionary. The instances which did not conform to the native English usage in COBUILD were then compared with those in LOB (British) and 'Brown' (American) corpora. Instances which appeared to be peculiar to Indian English were thereafter referred to some native speakers for attestation. Usages which were unacceptable to the native speakers were put down as peculiar to Indian English and were subjected to detailed analysis to discover constraints and distinctive typical tendencies. The study of these two-part verbs in Indian English showed that Indian English makes frequent use of these operation-words or verbalizers with substantives to form verbs and that the words that collocate with these verbs in Indian English differ to some extent from those in the native varieties. Moreover, the source of such two-part verbs may be the influence of Indian languages. In most Indian languages, many verb expressions are made up of two parts. The verbs 'get', 'take' and 'give' display higher percentages of deviations as compared to verbs 'do' and 'make'. Obviously, 'do' and 'make' are largely synonymous like 'get' and 'take'. But it appears that the choice between 'do' and 'make' in Indian English is more blurred than the choice between 'get' and 'take'. Quantitatively, it appears that the absolute frequencies of deviant instances in the Indian data are low. In other words, the bulk of Indian English data conforms to the native English usage. This confirms the 'common core' hypothesis regarding variety features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wordnets, which are repositories of lexical semantic knowledge containing semantically linked synsets and lexically linked words, are indispensable for work on computational linguistics and natural language processing. While building wordnets for Hindi and Marathi, two major Indo-European languages, we observed that the verb hierarchy in the Princeton Wordnet was rather shallow. We set to constructing a verb knowledge base for Hindi, which arranges the Hindi verbs in a hierarchy of is-a (hypernymy) relation. We realized that there are unique Indian language phenomena that bear upon the lexicalization vs. syntactically derived choice. One such example is the occurrence of conjunct and compound verbs (called Complex Predicates) which are found in all Indian languages. This paper presents our experience in the construction of lexical knowledge bases for Indian languages with special attention to Hindi. The question of storing versus deriving complex predicates has been dealt with linguistically and computationally. We have constructed empirical tests to decide if a combination of two words, the second of which is a verb, is a complex predicate or not. Such tests provide a principled way of deciding the status of complex predicates in Indian language wordnets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the emergence of local norms in Indian English at the level of verb complementation, an area which so far has not attracted much attention in research into New Englishes. In attempting to describe the verb-complementational profile of Indian English, we offer a pilot study which combines a descriptive aim and a methodological aim. At the descriptive level, the present article focuses on ditransitive verbs and their complementation and addresses two related questions: (1) To what extent do the frequency and distribution of complementation patterns of specific ditransitive verbs (e.g. give) differ between Indian English and British English? (2) To what extent is the basic ditransitive pattern with two object noun phrases (e.g. in he sent Mary his warmest wishes) associated with different verbs in British English and Indian English? The present paper reveals that in both regards there are clear and identifiable differences in verb complementation between the two varieties. At the methodological level, this pilot study combines the use of balanced and representative subcorpora from the International Corpus of English (ICE) with the in-depth analysis of a much larger database that has been extracted from the Internet archive of the daily Indian newspaper The Statesman. This makes it possible to also detect examples of low-frequency constructions in Indian English, e.g. sporadic cases of ditransitive complementation of verbs such as advise, gift and impart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the local stratification system as expressed through linguistic etiquette in context to a south Indian society. Apart from caste position, the elements of speech style are influenced by the concerned persons' attributes regarding wealth, power, education, age, sex and the degree of familiarity. Iruptar village lies on the main road between Madras, India and northern Kerala, India. The influence of Brahmins and Brahmin ideology in this region is rather weak. Irupatur has a typical Indian multiple caste structure. The Tamil spoken in Konku distinguishes between honorific, neutral and disrespectful verb forms. Brahmins use the respectful form sparingly. Some kinterms are tuned to differences' not of status but of age, sex, and economic position, and their use is largely limited to intercourse between the non-Brahmin upper castes. The Brahmins use honorific verb forms, and do not use personal names. it is humiliating to have to call cami anyone other than older Brahmins. The term belongs to the traditional masterservant situation and clearly suggests a very dependent position for the speaker.

This paper focuses on the role of light verbs in Gojri. Contrary to previous works, I argue in this paper that the light verb can either be placed before or after the main verb in Gojri, although the canonical position for the light verb is clearly V2, as is generally agreed. Furthermore, it discusses why the light verb in some cases prefers to appear in the V1 position. This paper introduces different light verbs used in Gojri and argues that they do not generate lexical meaning but contribute some aspectual reading. This paper also unfolds the fact that different light verbs are required to generate different reading, and some complex verbal formations such as complex predicates cannot be generated without them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study concerning the semantics and pragmatics of simple sentences and locative expressions in Haroti, Rajasthan in India. It notes that expressions or subject object verb (SOV) language in the region tends to be post-positional. It stresses that native speakers will not be able to understand various interpretations when local expressions are used in phrases and not in sentences. Verbal element is said to bring clarity to a sentence as well as numerous interpretations.