LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:3 March 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
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         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Playing Difficult to Understand? --
Single-verb Sentences and Nominal Sentences in Marathi

Jayashree Aanand Gajjam, M.A. (Sanskrit), Ph.D. (Pursuing) and Dr. Malhar A. Kulkarni, Professor

Abstract

The significant role of the verb in the sentence semantics has been established by various theories of verbal cognition in ancient Sanskrit literature as well as in the modern Linguistics. While a few theorists explain a sentence from a structural point of view, others consider the semantic aspect of it. We study the very first sentence-definition given by an ancient Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhart?hari in the second chapter of his magnificent work ‘V?kyapad?ya’ (circa 5th Century CE) which attributes the status of a sentence to a single-verb in the conversations.

This paper attempts to investigate the cognitive aspect of this definition along with a contrastive analysis of purely nominal sentences, and complete sentences to explore the interplay among them. The subjective reports of 100 neurologically healthy Marathi native and non-native speakers obtained from two web-based experiments suggest that the single-verbs in Marathi conversations are certainly comprehensible and hence can be regarded as a complete sentence. With the contrastive analysis, it is observed that, even though single-verb sentences and nominal sentences seem difficult to process, average Marathi readers understand them with similar effort as they process complete sentences. A few sociolinguistic variables which might affect the data such as age, gender, first language and period of language acquisition are taken into consideration while analysing the data and some inconsistencies among the results are noted. The effect of some textual features such as difficulty and familiarity with the text are also discussed. We account for the results by performing a statistical significance test using a standard t-test and z-test formulations and also by offering general remarks, observations, and discussion. The data is validated by calculating the inter-annotator agreement. Some limitations with respect to the data set, methodology and participants are given along with the possible future work before concluding the topic.

Keywords: Marathi, verb, nominal sentences, Language comprehension, web-based experiment

Introduction and Literature Review

Language is an integral part of the human communication process. Ancient Indian thinkers have devoted themselves to study the language from different analytical aspects such as phonetic, syntactic, semantic, logical, etymological, epistemological and metaphysical, etc. They have addressed various topics such as the source of the speech, different layers of the language, the ultimate unit of the language, notion of a word and a sentence, role of the function words, ways to disambiguate the word-meanings and determine the intended meaning, the process of verbal cognition, etc. The notions of a sentence and sentence-meaning have been a captivating area of discussion since then. Various ancient Indian etymologists, grammarians, logicians and rhetoricians have defined the sentence either from a formal perspective (i.e. structural- considering the only syntax) or from a semantic perspective. They have explored the meaning of the sentence which is in the form of an ‘action’. The discussion was carried on by modern Indian and western scholars about what makes a sentence and what are the necessary conditions for it. The complete discussion revolves around the presence or the absence of the verb in it. While few scholars agree that it is necessary for a linguistic string to have at least one verb to make it a sentence, others argue that Sanskrit, by resorting to Pa?ini’s grammar, allows constructions of purely nominal sentences which are devoid of any verb, either attested on the surface level of the language or understood mentally.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Jayashree Aanand Gajjam, M.A. (Sanskrit), Ph.D. (Pursuing)
Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
jayashree1aanand@gmail.com
Mobile No.: +91- 9637147261

Dr. Malhar A. Kulkarni, Professor
Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Powai, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400076
malhar@iitb.ac.in
Mobile No.: +91-8369752472
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