Bengali Constructions
New Label page for Bengali
Multiverb constructions (mvc) come in two varieties in Bangla:
- SVCs, with one important difference from SVCs in the Volta Basin: where in the latter all the verbs share tense and aspect (and count as ‘finite’), in the Bangla SVCs there is just one finite verb (the last one), and the others have a form called ‘conjunctive participle’.
- VVs – 2-verb sequences with one ‘pole’verb and one ‘vector’ verb, where the pole verb (the first verb) can be any transitive or intransitive verb, and the vector verb is one from a set of 15-20 verbs, in the VV connection determining aspect or orientation. The pole verb is in conjunctive participle form, the vector verb is finite.
In an SVC, a VV can take part counting as one ‘verb’.
In this respect, VVs relate to SVCs in a similar fashion as EVCs relate to SVCs in Ga.
So, schematically speaking, one can distinguish a ‘flush mvc’ from a ‘participle-finite mvc’, and an ‘indef-numbered mvc’ from a ‘restr-numbered mvc’:
(1) flush participle-finite indef-numbered restr-numbered | \ | \ / / | \ | \ / / | \ | / \ / | \ | / \ / | | \ / / / \
| / /\ / \
| / | / \ / \
/ | / \ / \
/ |/ \
Volta-BasinSVC BanglaSVC EVC (Ga) VV VV = ‘essential SVC’ (Ga)
Among issues concerning socalled 'verb compounds', or 'v-v-sequences', are:
- how to gloss each of the verbs;
- how to gloss the 'participial' morpheme.
Consider this annotated token:
| āmi |
| āmi |
| I1SG |
| PN |
| paṛe | |
| poṛ | e |
| fall | CMPL |
| V | |
| gelām | |
| ge | lām |
| go | 1P |
| V2 | |
Here 'e' is glossed 'CMPL', for 'completed', which is motivated by the fact that this so-called 'participial' form expresses completedness.
As for the verbs as wholes, one tradition calls the 'free' verb (the first one) the POLE verb and the other verb the VECTOR verb. Should these notions be used here?
Less telling is using 'V1' and 'V2'. For the time being, they are labeled 'V' and 'V2'.
--Lars 11:53, 10 December 2009 (UTC)