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Hindi Verb Classes and their Argument Structure Alternations
Author: Dr. Richa
Date Of Publication: Aug 2011
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3148-2
Isbn: 1-4438-3148-4
This book is an endeavour to probe into the areas of Hindi syntax which have been rather under-explored in generative literature. It investigates the syntax and semantics of Hindi verbs and their argument structure alternations within the minimalist framework. In the course of this exploration it examines unaccusativity, unergativity, transitive, causative alternations and passives in Hindi. The book will be of interest to theoretical linguists and computational linguists, as well as to Hindi syntax specialists.

Dr Richa is Senior Lecturer in the Linguistic Data Consortium for Indian Languages (LDC-IL) at the Central Institute for Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore, India. Her specialization is minimalist syntax. Primarily working in Hindi-Urdu, she has also worked in other languages such as Rangboli (a Tibeto-Burman language), EkeGusii (a Bantu language) and Indian Sign Language (ISL). She is the author of the book Possessive Reflexives and Pronominals in Hindi-Urdu and ISL: A Minimalist Perspective (2010).

“An important contribution to the study of South Asian languages within the generative tradition. Dr Richa brings together a wealth of facts about verb classes in Hindi and probes their implications for syntactic theory. The empirical range as well as the theoretical reach of this work is impressive. I expect it to become a must-read for anyone wishing to work on any topic related to Hindi verbs.”

—Prof. Veneeta Dayal, Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

“This book is crucially based on the classification of Hindi verbs into distinct groups, subject to syntactic tests. It studies the behaviour of these different classes and their argument structure alternation. The work as a whole is based both on general theoretical work and on the analyses of Hindi from [the] earliest days of generative grammar. The discussion is remarkably clear and admirably well organized, forming a lucid and useful contribution to the understanding of Hindi syntax and semantics.”

—Prof. Alice Davison, University of Iowa, USA

“This book is a major contribution to our understanding of Hindi-Urdu syntax. It provides the beginning of a lexical semantic classification of Hindi-Urdu verbs along the lines of Levin and Rapaport-Hovav. As far as I know, this is the first attempt of this sort and is likely to spur further work in this important area. . . . One major contribution made here is the foregrounding of the role animacy plays in the unaccusative/unergative distinction in Hindi-Urdu. Another is the analysis of passivization, which makes a good case that contrary to what has been assumed elsewhere, there is never any promotion to subject position in Hindi-Urdu passives.”

—Dr Rajesh Bhatt, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics, The University of Massachusetts, USA

“This book is a very important contribution to our understanding of the syntax and semantics of Hindi verb classes and argument structure alternations, and breaks new ground in a number of respects, both theoretically as well as empirically.”

—Dr Ayesha Kidwai, Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Price Uk Gbp: 34.99
Price Us Usd: 52.99

Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

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