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Abstract

Investigating the Probability of External Causation in Hindi Light Verb Constructions

Authors
  • Kanishka Jain (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi)
  • Ashwini Vaidya

Abstract

The predominant approach to analyze ‘causal-noncausal’ alternation in linguistics is by showing that one of the forms tends to be more coded (morphologically or phonologically) than the other. However, the scope of previous studies has been limited to lexical and morphological causative alternations, and the use of other predicates as causatives have been neglected. This work aims at analyzing specific light verb constructions  in Hindi, where nominals alternating with the light verbs /kərna/ ‘do' and /hona/ ‘be' signal causal and noncausal meaning, respectively. In particular, we extend the notion of causality to the nouns in a light verb construction. We show that the predicating nouns have a preference towards the light verb they combine with such that nouns that carry agent-oriented semantics  occur more frequently with the causal verb ‘do’. On the other hand nouns that are not agentive prefer the noncausal verb ‘be’.

Keywords: causality, causative verb, light verb constructions, form-frequency correspondence, Hindi

How to Cite:

Jain, K. & Vaidya, A., (2025) “Investigating the Probability of External Causation in Hindi Light Verb Constructions”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 8(1): 35. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.3143

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Published on
2025-06-13

Peer Reviewed