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Language comprehension has been a fascinating area of research for grammarians, linguists, philosophers and computer scientists alike. In Marathi grammatical tradition, a sentence is viewed from the verb-centric position in several treatises. Moreover, the complete discussion is put in a theoretical framework. The current report, the extension of earlier research on the Marathi language, adopts an experimental outlook to examine the communicative aspect of the sentence in colloquial (non-standard variety) Marathi written conversations. Based on the subjective reports of 95 native and non-native readers obtained from four experiments it is argued that a single-verb in a conversation is comprehensible hence can be regarded as a complete sentence itself. The contrastive analysis suggests that complete sentences are easier to process than single-verb sentences, which in turn, are more accurately comprehended than nominal sentences. Resorting on textual and sociolinguistic variables, the report also probes into the underlying nuances of language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectual Humility (IH) is defined in several ways, sometimes as the opposite of Intellectual Arrogance, or as the construct encompassing certain cognition-specific virtues studied under the Virtue Epistemology branch of Philosophy. In 2015, researchers at the University of Edinburgh developed a Doxastic Account of Intellectual Humility which defined it as a virtuous mean between Intellectual Arrogance and Intellectual Diffidence. Scholars have derived the five most important character traits of an Intellectually Humble person through various theories and experiments, which are given the term the 'BIG FIVE'. Thirukkural ('Sacred maxims'), an ancient Indian classic Tamil masterpiece (circa 2nd century BC) written by Saint Thiruvalluvar has long taught us the practice of aRam, i.e., Virtues and Ethics. Among all other virtues, the virtues of Intelligence and Humility are considered the greatest aspiration and essence of human life. The current research undertakes a comparative analysis of the modern theory of IH and the ancient Thirukkural and develops its own BIG SEVEN of IH specific to the teachings of Thirukkural. This work is an extension of the author's earlier theoretical work on IH in Sanskrit Upaniadic narratives and of experimental research on 140 Indian adults. The final aim of this research is to derive Indian insights on IH, thereby discovering panhuman traits of IH so that they can be implemented in the Indian population for a harmonious future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kāraka theory in the Pā inian grammatical tradition in the Sanskrit studies stands as a benchmark to understand the confluence of Sanskrit syntax and semantics. The theory has been explored from syntactico-semantic and philosophical perspectives till date by ancient and modern scholars in India and beyond. Relying on the earlier theoretical discussions, the current report, the first of its kind, tries to investigate the cognition of the kārakas in real-life human communication by carrying out experimental research on a total of 900 readers of Sanskrit and Marathi. The study argues that (1) the ontological classification of the verbs affects the cognition of the kārakas, (2) while kartā (agent) and karma (object/destination) of the verb are more accurately cognized, adhikaraa (location/substratum) of the verb is not, unless it adds to the main semantic component of the sentence, (3) the first language of the readers affects their comprehension of the kārakas in the second language, provided if the secondlanguage is not used in daily life conversations. The novelty of the research lies in the experimental methodology that is still in its infancy in Sanskrit studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children show tremendous abilities in their language acquisition and language use. The current research reports the patterns in the language use of Arya, a four-year-old, female, neurologically healthy, multilingual child in India. A subjective report based on the observations of conversations in person and over phone calls obtained over a span of more than two and half years suggests that, in cross-cultural settings, multilingual children display communicative competence in their language use without any special instructions, provided they are exposed to the optimum amount of linguistic exposure. This research argues that children use their communicative competence as a socialization pattern to identify themselves with kith and kin. The research also hints at the future scope in pedagogy in general and in creating language teaching models, in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sentence-definition 'ākhyātaśabdaḥ' in the 'Vākyapadῑya' written by Bhartrihari attributes the status of the sentence to the single-verb expressions when they necessarily denote the complete implied meaning of the sentence. Although various ancient and modern scholars have addressed this notion from a theoretical point of view, there is a need to revisit it from an innovative and explorative perspective. We study this definition from an experimental outlook using Sanskrit conversational data. We found that the single verbs in the written data are certainly comprehensible, notwithstanding, in a few cases, they demand more mental exercise to process as compared to the complete sentences. Along with this cognitive vista, we also explore a sociolinguistic aspect of the definition by taking into consideration readers' demographical data. A statistical significance test is performed to validate this data. Finally, we present discussion, limitations and the possible future work of this study. This research aims at exploring the scope, working and the limitations of the definition to understand the nature of a single-verb sentence from a cognitive and sociolinguistic point of views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The significant role of the verb in the sentence semantics has been established by various theories of verbal cognition in ancient Sanskrit literature as well as in the modern Linguistics. While a few theorists explain a sentence from a structural point of view, others consider the semantic aspect of it. We study the very first sentence-definition given by an ancient Indian grammarian and philosopher Bhartŗhari in the second chapter of his magnificent work 'Vākyapadīya' (circa 5th Century CE) which attributes the status of a sentence to a single-verb in the conversations. This paper attempts to investigate the cognitive aspect of this definition along with a contrastive analysis of purely nominal sentences, and complete sentences to explore the interplay among them. The subjective reports of 100 neurologically healthy Marathi native and non-native speakers obtained from two web-based experiments suggest that the single-verbs in Marathi conversations are certainly comprehensible and hence can be regarded as a complete sentence. With the contrastive analysis, it is observed that, even though single-verb sentences and nominal sentences seem difficult to process, average Marathi readers understand them with similar effort as they process complete sentences. A few sociolinguistic variables which might affect the data such as age, gender, first language and period of language acquisition are taken into consideration while analysing the data and some inconsistencies among the results are noted. The effect of some textual features such as difficulty and familiarity with the text are also discussed. We account for the results by performing a statistical significance test using a standard t-test and z-test formulations and also by offering general remarks, observations, and discussion. The data is validated by calculating the inter-annotator agreement. Some limitations with respect to the data set, methodology and participants are given along with the possible future work before concluding the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]