Prerna Nadathur (Ohio State University) will give an online colloquium. Here is the Zoom link.
On the interaction of aspect and ability in two Hindi/Urdu constructions
Complex predicates with the Hindi/Urdu light verb le (lit., ‘take’) show an unexpected pattern of interpretation in composition with grammatical aspect. Perfective le contributes a completive interpretation (Singh 1990, a.o.), while imperfective le predicates instead take a dispositional/modal reading (Butt 1997). This talk pursues a unified account: I compare complex le predicates to uses of the English implicative verb manage, and examine its aspectual alternation in comparison with the well-known aspect-sensitive actuality entailments of the Hindi/Urdu ability modal (Bhatt 1999). I draw on prior work (Nadathur 2023a,b) to argue that all three types of predicate share presuppositional reference to a particular causal background structure, but differ crucially in their asserted contributions, predicting the observed patterns of interpretation in composition with contrastive (im)perfective aspects. This approach points to an underlying link between the aspectual properties of event types and the structure of causal models (language-independent representations of contextual causal information), which supposedly ‘aspectual’ light verbs in Hindi/Urdu and other languages are well-positioned to probe.
