A Descriptive Study of Explicator and Reverse Compound Verbs in Magahi - The Case of a Less-resourced Language.

The phenomena of Reversed Compound Verbs (RCVs) and Explicator Compound Verbs (ECVs) have attracted a great deal of attention and focus recently by Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, as they are one of the salient features in almost all the South Asian languages. An ECV refers to the sort of constructions wherein the two different verbs i.e., v1 and v2 are sequentially arranged in order to form a meaningful expression. Here v1, which is the main verb of the sentence, is being followed by an auxiliary verb v2, which is later de-lexicalized. On the other hand, an RCV is a type of compound verb formation in south Asian languages that was first noticed by Hook in 1974. An RCV is the reordered structuring of the same Compound Verb (CV), which is found in almost all south Asian languages as a special feature. The present paper is an attempt to examine the formation of both of these types of verbs and analyze their functions in Magahi. One could also find it interesting in investigating what happens to other linguistic properties of Magahi like syntactic, semantic and morphological properties when the structure is rearranged. It will also be interesting if both of these verb forms namely ECVs and RCVs show any sort of resemblance among them in Magahi once formed and how well they are accepted in the society. The present paper is also an attempt at making an aerial survey of Magahi language, which is one of the regional variations of Bihari languages and to figure out if there are any issues or challenges faced while reshuffling, reordering or restructuring CVs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]