This book is the revised version of the D. Phil thesis, "Semantic structure and the verb with reference to Panjabi" which was accepted by Jawaharlal Nehru University.
This is a study of propositional structures that constitute the core grammar of the sentences of language. The arguments and findings are not language particular and the examples could as well be drawn from English or from any other language for that matter. In other words, to the extent that the propositional structures are structures of thought, they have the status of linguistic universals.
In the analysis and the setting up of these propositional types, the Paninean Karaka theory has been adopted and adapted. This implies an acceptance of the metascientific assumption categorically asserted by Bharthari, that the maximum number of logically distinct karakas ('means in the accomplishment of events') is only six and that the apparent variants appear different only on account of the nature of classes of nouns involved as means in diverse events.
And, in the extensive analysis of the possible and the actual relation changes in the propositional types, we provide evidence for the considerable free-will that the human beings possess, within a logical framework, in their use of language to communicate reality. This is an exercise in the direction of finding an adequate answer to what, according to Noam Chomsky, constitutes the central mystery of 'how we use language to express our thoughts, communicate with others...., a problem 'which resists our understanding in quite fundamental respects. (Mental Representations, 1983, p. 18). It is being suggested that Bhartshari's concept of vivaksha ('speaker's intention') may turn out to have considerable explanatory power in this and such other questions that involve choice.
I am much indebted to Prof. KJ. Mahale, Professor of French, Jawaharlal Nehru University and now Vice-Chancellor, Manipur University, who was my adviser for the doctoral research.
After years of involvement in and partnership with transformational linguistic models, there has been, is the last few years, a growing opposition towards these models and a greater willingness to experiment with and invest in semantic models of language org nisation. Justification for this trend has come even from outside the church the computer translators have felt obliged to strive to formalise semantic primitives (Wilks. 1979: 37), and prychologists have begun to "feel more at home with semantic case theories than they do with the formulations of generative transformational grammar" (Kess, 1976: 5) This shift may be attributed to several factors-(i) the growing awareness that syntactic well-formednesa reflecta semantic well-formedness; (ii) the potential capacity of semantic modeli to link language, thought and reality, (iii) greater chances of semantic primitives holding across languages, and (iv) the semantic models providing more adequate tools for applicational research in cognitive psychology. contrastive lexicology and literary analysis. All semantic models share the concept of verb centrality. With the verb as nucleus, it is possible to specify the close relationship between sentence patterns and particular classes of verbs. Sentences get reduced to propositions-semantic configurations of nouns depending on, and compatible with, the verb. These relations, variously called "deep cases', 'relational constants and Karakas, once isolated and defined, are significant theoretical constructs they constitute linguistic universals, and represent conceptual universals very closely, they are descriptive categories for language structure, they show how human knowledge about the world at large is organized in terms of some fundamental relationship, and, they reveal the internal logic by which people order their thoughts Important studies conducted with recall of propositional structures on which sentences are based have shown that the meaning-representation in human memory is organized around the concept of these noun-verb relations (Kintsch, 1974). Similarly, using a propositional model based on N-V relations, Ross in a pilot study examined the speech of two psychiatric patients and discovered how the two patients attributed different semantic functions to, among others, the Agent relation: one of them looked upon others as Agents capable of doing things 'to him, and the other looked upon others as Agents capable of doing things for him' (Ross, 1976:6) Here was a peep into the way individuals relate themselves to fellow-beings in terms of these relations.
It is well-known that Chafe's generative semantics, Fillmore's Case grammar, the Relational grammar and the primarily European Valence grammar are the chief models that concern themselves with Noun-Verb relations, and also that they do not agree on the number and nature of relations required to specify the propositional structures of languages.
With this perspective, we have investigated the nature of propositional structure of language through an intensive analysis of Panjabi, an Indo-Iranian language of the North-West of India. We begin by having a brief look at the movement in the dominant contemporary theory the TG theory-towards a core "deep structure' that is a close approximation of the original impulse for this notion in the western grammatical theory, viz., the propositional underlying structures of the Port-Royal grammarians.
In the second chapter, we consider the language-view that assumes Noun-Verb relations as primitives, briefly illustrate semantic configurations based on these relations, and discuss the canonical primacy of the verb for setting up the propositional structures in terms of the noun-verb relations.
In the third chapter, we discuss the verb phrase in Panjabi-the verb-phrase, the phrase-base, the two parts of phrase base the root and the marker and show how it is the meaning of the verb roots that is crucial for propositional analysis. We discuss the meaning of the verb-root, discuss the familiar state-process-action triad showing that these three classes are not as much classes based on the meaning of the verb roots, as modes of predication and conclude the chapter by describing the system of altering the predication-mode in Panjabi. Every language, theoretically, should regularly allow such alteration of modes.
In the fourth chapter, we discuss the question of number of obligatory nominals required to be specified for the verb-roots. The discussion revolves round a search for criteria and ends with the analysis of 120 verbs that we have chosen as a representative sample for our work. In the fifth chapter, we concern
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