Grammaticalisation of the Verb ‘ləɡ’ in Punjabi, Hindi and Bangla Languages

Abstract

This paper specifies some aspects of the grammaticalisation process by verifying three parallel languages namely Punjabi, Hindi and Bangla for primary data. The whole study is divided into two kinds of initial observations related to the polysemous verb „ləɡ‟. In Punjabi, the verb „ləɡ‟ has various interpretations (of attend, give, use etc.) which are directly related to the subject matter of knowing the grammaticalisation phenomena in languages. However, these interpretations of one language become more visible and useful in the attempt of locating similar or dissimilar results of such verbs in other languages. With this as the purpose of the study, Punjabi is selected as the source language. Hindi and Bangla can easily be marked as semantic bleaching cases among these three languages. By and large, the investigation starts with a study of the occurrence of the verb „ləɡ‟ in V1 and V2 positions, where both similarities and dissimilarities come out straightforwardly. Semantic range of the verb „ləɡ‟ was also noticed where Bangla gives some results different from the other two languages. Other cases like „de-categorisation‟ can be included in the future work with identifying more closeness among the above three languages.