English-to-Hindi Mapping of Compositional Verb-Particle Constructions

Abstract

The present study investigates the semantic correspondence in the Hindi translation equivalents of compositional English verb-particle constructions (EVPCs) with the particle up. The compositional constructions include the directional and aspectual functions of particles.  The study concentrates on the semantic representation of literal spatial directional and aspectual completive functions of the particle up in Hindi, a major Indian language. The researchers selected some frequent EVPCs, took examples from the British National Corpus and manually translated them into Hindi with the help of relevant dictionaries and corpus resources, including native speaker intuitions. Further, the obtained Hindi translational equivalents were analyzed for morphosyntactic structure and semantic correspondence. The study found that the compositional EVPCs are mapped in Hindi by simple(v) and complex verb constructions(verb/noun/adjective/adverb-verb). The spatial directional sense of the particle up is either lexicalized in the simple Hindi verb or polar verb (v1) of the Hindi compound verb(v1-v2), whereas in Hindi conjunct verb constructions, this directional sense is explicitly realized as a verbal modifier (generally adverb). The vector verb (v2) of the Hindi compound verb appears to map the aspectual-completive sense of the respective particle.