Compound Verbs in Kashmiri, by Vijay Kumar Kaul. Delhi:

Compound verb is a lexico-grammatical feature of South Asian languages, to which considerable attention has been given, yet it remains one of the most poorly understood features of the language. It is made up of a sequence of two verbs V1 and V2 in which V1 is generally the main verb in SOV languages and V2 is the delexicalised verb. According to Masica (1976: 141-58) the function of V2 is to unfold the latent semantics of V1. Hook (1974) deals with the formal and semantic criteria needed to distinguish the class of compound verbs from other types of verb sequences in Hindi, and consequently isolated twenty four vectors (V2). Kashmiri belongs to the Dardic branch of the Indo-Aryan family. Yet it is different from all other Indo-Aryan languages in certain phonological, morphological and syntactic features. It is a verb second (V-2) language. So the order of the verb sequence in compound verbs is different from that found in other Indo-Aryan languages. The main verb occurs at the end of the sentence and the operator or explicator in the middle of the sentence. The compound verb in Kashmiri, as explained by Kachru (1969: 237), " … comprise of V-suffix and an operator ". It is made up of the " … conjunctive participial form [V-ith] of the main predicate " (Abbi 2001:189) and a finite form of an explicator or vector or operator, which is homophonous with a full lexical verb. It is, however, difficult to predict the function of the suffix-ith in Kashmiri compound verbs. The book under review is focused on the study of compound verbs in Kashmiri. It is a revised version of the doctoral dissertation of the author, Vijay Kumar Kaul, implying that the subject under consideration forms a part of his interest. The analysis of compound verbs has been done from a semantico-syntactic perspective as had been done by Hook (1974), to identify the conditions of their occurrence and non-occurrence. Beside this ample space has been given to their morpho-syntactic markedness which is correlated with their formation and usage in the language. The book has six chapters. The first chapter " ' Introductory Review " is a review of literature on the study of compound verbs in South Asian Languages. This is an essential chapter of the book as the readers get to know how much work has already been done in this area. It also …