Premium
Something's gotta go , something's gotta give : completion, mirativity and transitivity in odia light verb constructions
Author(s) -
Lemmens Maarten,
Sahoo Kalyanamalini
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12046
Subject(s) - transitive relation , verb , focus (optics) , linguistics , event (particle physics) , philosophy , computer science , history , mathematics , combinatorics , physics , optics , quantum mechanics
This paper deals with asymmetric complex predicates (combining a main verb and a ‘light’ verb) in Odia, an Indo‐Aryan language. The main focus is on the two most common light verbs ‐ jaa ‘go’ and ‐ de ‘give’. We argue that these light verbs are constructions in their own right affecting the interpretation of the event in two ways: (i) they necessarily refer to the completion of the event (as opposed to the single verb construction) and (ii) they typically express unexpectedness or abruptness and can as such be considered a mirative construction as defined by Delancey (2012). Transitivity plays a major role not only in the distinction between ‐ jaa ‘go’ and ‐ de ‘give’ but also in differences of degree of completion and unexpectedness.