Argument Composition in N+LV Complex Predicates of Kannada

Complex Predicates (CPs hereafter) are abundant in Dravidian Languages spoken in the Southern part of India. A CP is a multi-word expression that acts as one verbal unit where a Light Verb (LV hereafter) plays a vital role (Amberber et al., 2010). LVs, with their syntactic and semantic features and preverbs, determine the argument structure of the whole CP construction. LVs have a distinctive feature of acquiring contextual meanings in combination with the preverbal elements, and this phenomenon is common across language families. (Hook 1991, 1993, Butt 1995). N+LV CPs and Noun Incorporation (NI) structures, which appear to be the same phenomenon, are two different structures altogether, though both have N+V composition. Baker (1988) proposes some defining characteristics for NI structures, which are indeed short for Dravidian languages like Kannada and Telugu, which are highly rich in morpho-syntactic features. According to SK Nadimpalli et al. (2022), additional characteristics exist that can effectively distinguish CPs from NIs. These were demonstrated using Telugu data. The present research concentrates on the difference between NIs and CPs with regard to the argument composition of the whole predicate. The study will also investigate how preverbal nouns in CPs, with specific semantic features, combine with different LVs and how the whole argument structure is composed, with the help of Kannada data as a case in point. The LVs exhibit a wide range of syntactic and semantic properties in consonance with the preverbal noun it combines with to constitute a CP construction. The selection of LVs is inherently language-specific, with LVs in Kannada potentially exhibiting different syntactic and semantic behaviors compared to their counterparts in Telugu. This study, with data from Kannada, would add to the syntactic and semantic repertoire of LVs and N+ LV CPs in Dravidian languages in particular and to the Universal Grammar at large.