Verb: A Cognitive Facilitator A Case of Marathi Colloquial Conversations.

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]