Head feature principle and multiverb construction

[soma paul]

The HEAD feature of a multiverb construction as exemplified below is not token-identical to the HEAD feature of its head daugther.

Indo-Aryan languages have one kind of multi-verb construction, which is commonly known as Compound Verb (CV). One example,

meye-Ta heS-e oTh-e

girl –cl laugh-cp rise-3 pr            ‘The girl burst in laughter’

           V1          V2

We will highlight three distinctive features of CV constructions:

   The V2 bears the categorial information and the inflection.
   Except for a few cases the argument structure of CV sequences and that of their V1 counterpart are identical.
   The semantics of CV sequence is always an extension or modification of that of its V1 counterpart. In other words, CV sequences retain the core meaning of its V1 participant and the V2s add some semantic nuances.

CV sequences can, therefore, be justifiably considered as a lexical variant of their V1 counterpart. The lexeme type for V1s is attributed a feature VEC which specifies its V2 requirement, just like the value of ARG-ST specifies a verb’s argument requirement.



Now the head feature principle stipulates the HEAD value of V1, the head daughter, and the phrases headed by V1 and consequently by CV sequence being identical. As we have seen in (1), the categorial information for a CV sequence is borne by its V2 participant. Therefore the HEAD information is required to be inherited from the V2 dependent, although V2 is not the head daughter.



In the existing system I postulate a compound feature principle. This principle introduces the following stipulation on the type word: The HEAD of a verb-word type, which has a non-empty VEC list, inherits categorial information from the HEAD of its V2 dependent (the value within VEC). Since this constraint is defined on word type, it does not violate the existing head feature principle, which builds the structure of HEAD of a phrase from that of the head daughter. When the head feature principle and the compound feature principle jointly builds the structure of phrasal structure for CV sequences whose head daughter is a CV sequence, the structural description of HEAD will acquire the correct information.



I will be grateful if you send me your insightful comment on what I discussed above.






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