Ara Shah, University of Hyderabad, 1995
Thesis Supervisor: Probal Dasgupta
The syntactic approach chosen for this dissertation seeks to describe complement clauses, their structure, their idiosyncrasies, and attempts to understand their behaviour in terms of wider linguistic principles. This dissertation is within the generative paradigm.
However, this dissertation maintains two attitudes. The first ensures that the dissertation provides a useful account for translators in the form of an exhaustive compilation of complements selecting verbs in Hindi and Gujarati and a thorough description of the types of complement constructions. The other attitude channelizes the focus of this dissertation in a direction which attempts to raise certain theoretical issues regarding the Hindi/Gujarati language pair.
Chapter 1 is the Introduction. It spells out the approach and the attitudes underlying this dissertation as well as the motivation behind them. Chapter 2 deals with finite complement clauses in Hindi and Gujarati. The major issues taken up in this chapter are (i) the nature of ki and (ii) the non canonical position of the finite complement clause. This is a phenomenon common to several Indo Aryan languages, as well as to certain Germanic languages, as is evident from the discussion. We report a number of accounts regarding this phenomenon. I argue that the complement clauses in Hindi/Gujarati are extraposed to the right in order to be licensed by the matrix verbal complex. Issues of adjacency, directionality of government and theta marking will be discussed in the course of this chapter.
Chapter 3 deals with non finite complement clauses, the three main sections dealing with gerunds, infinitivals and participials. We situate our discussion of gerunds within the minimalist framework, which we will modify in order to account for the Hindi/Gujarati kaa naa constructions. We then discuss infinitivals, that is, complement clauses with a postpositional complementizer. Using Kayne (1984) as a point of departure, we account for the null subject in infinitivals and postulate a phonetically null P/C in Hindi and Gujarati. This chapter also throws light on certain difficult to classify constructions, thereby contributing to the debate on "nominal clauses".
Small clause complements are discussed in chapter 4. The interesting fact about small clauses in Hindi/Gujarati is that the subject of the construction is assigned Accusative Case. In this chapter we attempt to reformulate the hypotheses offered in Mahajan (1990) and Sinha (1991) in order to account for the alternative range of interpretations that are available due to factors of animacy, specificity and definiteness.
Chapter 5 aims to provide a working bilingual dictionary for a closely related language pair. In this chapter we will present the agreement patterns available for verbs in Hindi/Gujarati. The main purpose of this chapter is to collate information for designing a specific purpose dictionary, a sample of which will be presented. An index of complement selecting verbs in Hindi and Gujarati is provided at the end of the chapter.