Volume 18, No. 6, 2021
Morphosyntactic Sub-Categorization Of Lexical Verbs
Qaisar Jabbar , Asad Ali , Nazir Ahmad Malik , Nazarat Mahmood , Muhammad Wasif Hanif
Abstract
The present study sharply sub-categorizes lexical verbs/verbal infinitives/bare roots (Butt, 2003; González-Vilbazo, 2005) taking empirical evidence from mixed dataset of diverse Asian language pair—English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi theoretically employing minimalist program (Chomsky, 1995). Gonzalez-Vilbazo & Lopez (2011) postulated ‘conjugative’ properties of light verbs and claimed that language switching/mixing within verbal complex i.e. the lexical verb/bare root/verbal infinitive (eat) and light verb (kar) asymmetrically hinges on the conjugative properties of light verb not on lexical verbs/verbal infinitives/bare roots. Asian bilingual data clarifies that all lexical verbs/verbal infinitives/bare roots are not constituted the same traditional status. This study predicts that English verbs—eat, talk, tell, give, sleep, weep, and Urdu verbs— btaa, khaa, soo, roo, daey are special type of lexical items. These verbal infinitives/bare roots/lexical verbs neither incorporate into conjugative light verb nor light verb check and delete their uninterpretable features (UIF) neither in monolingual nor bilingual datasets. This study however suggeststhat lexical verbs/bare roots/verbal infinitives are sub-categorized into +F lexical verbs and –F lexical verbs. –F lexical verbs are totally free as they are integrated into light verb morphosyntactic frame but +F lexical verbs are not occurred with light verb neither in monolingual nor bilingual data. If any single +f feature remain un-deleted within the derivation, the derivation will not be computed unless this +features will be eliminated (Chomsky, 1995).
Pages: 4145-4165
Keywords: sub-categorization, minimalism, morphosyntax, deleted, features