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Verb-phrase ellipsis and complex predicates in Hindi-Urdu

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Abstract

Complex predicates are found in diverse languages and feature multiple predicates that map to a monoclausal syntactic structure. They represent a fascinating instance of the systematic combination of syntactically and semantically independent elements to function as a unit. While complex predicates in Hindi-Urdu have received significant attention (Hook 1974; Mohanan 1994; Butt 1995), not yet addressed are the ways in which these constructions interact with verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), which has famously revealed much about the structure of the verbal domain. In head-final languages like Hindi-Urdu, the nature of the morphologically and lexically complex verb is difficult to probe; any head movement would typically be string-vacuous. The results of the investigation of VPE in complex predicates in this article suggest Hindi-Urdu features syntactic head movement of the components of the complex predicate to a functional head outside the vP. I build on Butt and Ramchand’s (2005) approach to Hindi-Urdu complex predicates featuring decomposed verbal structure to develop an account of the verbal domain that captures the syntactic connectedness between components of the complex predicate. This article engages with a set of highly topical questions concerning the status of head movement as a unified phenomenon (Hartman 2011; Lacara 2016; McCloskey 2016; Gribanova and Harizanov 2016; i.a.) and develops V-stranding VPE (McCloskey 1991; Goldberg 2005; Gribanova 2013a, 2013b; Sailor 2018) as a critical tool for investigating verb-final languages under this research program. Ultimately at stake is a contribution to the far larger project of elucidating the nature of head movement in head-final languages.

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Notes

  1. In the text that follows, unless the data is specifically cited otherwise, the judgements displayed were obtained from a group of nine native-speaker consultants who assessed sentences provided on a five-point scale. When native speakers judged the sentence anything but completely acceptable, a footnote explains the grammaticality marking.

  2. A reviewer asks whether (15c) could be understood as an instance of VVPE in which the internal argument has leftward scrambled out of the vP, leaving an elided vP containing the trace of the scrambled internal argument and the adverb twice. If so, the “twice” reading should be available in (15c), counter to fact. However, it is likely that this analysis of (15c) would be ruled out: since short scrambling is widely understood as A-movement and does not reconstruct (e.g. Mahajan 1990; Bhatt 2003), it could not be used to compute identity between an antecedent and elliptical clause. This state of affairs is altered by contrastive focus placed on the object in Japanese (Funakoshi 2014, 2016), and may be so in Hindi-Urdu as well.

  3. The crosslinguistic picture may be somewhat more complex. There is mounting evidence that focus plays an important role in the (in)felicity of verb mismatch (Gribanova 2013b, 2015). Although I don’t investigate this property for Hindi-Urdu here, ultimately these facts will be important in determining precisely how the identity requirement of ellipsis is ultimately characterized.

  4. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this question to my attention.

  5. Thanks to Ayesha Kidwai for judgements and discussion. She reports that for her simply knowing about Raj’s habitual carelessness is sufficient to facilitate the null adjunct reading in (17b).

  6. The fact that (24) is unacceptable indicates that VVPE, argument ellipsis, and null pronominals are all prohibited in these contexts. We can see from the improvement resulting from the provision of a linguistic antecedent in (25) below, that VVPE is certainly possible within islands. As we might expect, a version of (24) in which the gap is not embedded within an island is judged by the informants in this study to be significantly better (the ? label indicates that not all informants judged these to be fully acceptable).

    1. (i)
      figure v

    As a reviewer points out, null pronominals that are embedded, but not within an island, are certainly acceptable. I take this to mean that like in Russian, Hindi-Urdu does not permit null pronominal objects inside of islands. For more on why this might be so, see Gribanova (2013a) and references cited therein.

  7. A reviewer provides the following (marked) example in which a constituent can intervene between the main verb and the light verb within the verbal complex.

    1. (i)
      figure aj

    Butt et al. (2016) propose that this marked word order is prosodic in nature, for the purposes of placing primary focal stress on the main verb (see also Bhatt and Dayal 2007; Manetta 2012; Butt 2014). The present account is not inconsistent with a leftward displacement-based account of verbal focus.

  8. Kumar claims (contra Mahajan 1990) that the head hosting negation is found above the aspectual head in Hindi-Urdu. I follow Dwivedi (1991) and Bhatt and Dayal (2007) in the claim that the verbs move to an aspectual head above vP, and that head dominates negation when present. Though space does not permit a detailed discussion of negation in Hindi-Urdu, the interaction of negation with some complex predicates is discussed in Sect. 4.3.

  9. Butt and Ramchand (2005) also examine V-V constructions of the so-called ‘let’ type in which the main verb is in its infinitival form. I do not investigate these types of constructions, though their interaction with verb phrase ellipsis should be part of a wider, more comprehensive approach to complex predication in the language.

  10. A reviewer suggests that the situation in Persian may also be more intricate than it might seem from Toosarvandani’s analysis. Though Toosarvandani provides a wide range of complex predicates (intransitive, (di)transitive, with multiple light verbs) that do undergo vVPE, there may some N-V predicates in Persian that resist vVPE strings. If it is the case that Persian N-V predicates have a wider range of behaviors under VPE than was previously thought, Persian might be subject to the analysis proposed in the present article for Hindi-Urdu N-V complex predicates. There is clearly further careful empirical work to be done.

  11. Thanks to Tafseer Ahmed and Miriam Butt for helpful discussion of these data.

  12. Miriam Butt (p.c.) observes that those complex predicates in which the inflected light verb is more semantically “contentful” (e.g. with de ‘give’) seem better able to support vVPE strings compared to those which are less “contentful,” (e.g. with ho ‘be’).

  13. In contrast to Megerdoomian’s structure in (70) in the text above, I maintain that the noun in Hindi-Urdu heads an NP as in Folli et al. This claim is based on a number of important properties of the nominal that are not unlike properties of incorporated nouns in Hindi-Urdu (Mohanan 1994; Butt 1995, 2010; Dayal 2003, 2011) and which are discussed in further detail below.

  14. In contrast, Megerdoomian (2012) reports that in Persian while adjectives do appear adjacent to the nominal in complex predicates, the modification is interpreted as adverbial or a modification of the event described by the complex predicate.

  15. Baker (2014) also uses this linearization account to explain why nominals in PNI structures in Hindi-Urdu may in some contexts be scrambled away from the verb.

  16. In the case of a complex predicate consisting of a nominal (ghussa ‘anger’), a main verb (aa ‘come’), and a light verb (jaa ‘go’), the main and light verb may be displaced to sentence-initial position as a unit without the nominal (Butt 1995:105).

    1. (i)
      figure bm

  17. Thanks to Rajesh Bhatt, Anoop Mahajan, and participants of the 2016 International Conference on Hindi Studies (Paris) for their engaged discussions of this question.

  18. There is other interesting data relevant to this section that I set aside here, due to the fact that native-speaker linguists seem to disagree. Butt (1995:101) claims that coordination of two main verbs (and their complements) underneath a single light verb is ungrammatical (as expected under the present account), but Mahajan (2012: fn. 6) claims that it is possible. My informants are also not uniform in their judgements on this point.

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Acknowledgements

This work has benefitted from the input of many generous colleagues. In particular, I thank Ayesha Kidwai, Rajesh Bhatt, Miriam Butt, Tafseer Ahmed, Alice Davison (our conversations will be much missed), Anoop Mahajan, Vera Gribanova, Jim McCloskey, Peter Hook, and Ghanshyam Sharma. For their discussion of Hindi-Urdu data, I am grateful to Khushboo Jain, Asim Zia, Parvin Pothiawala, Shashank Jain, Hira Haq, Saleem and Maria Ali, and Aakar Desai. Finally, thanks are due to three anonymous NLLT reviewers for their insightful feedback; all remaining errors are my own.

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Manetta, E. Verb-phrase ellipsis and complex predicates in Hindi-Urdu. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 37, 915–953 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9429-9

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