Urdu/Hindi Motion Verbs and Their Implementation in a Lexical Resource

A central task of natural language processing is to find a way of answering the question Who did what to whom, how, when and where? with automatic means. This requires insights on how a language realizes events and the participants that partake in them and how this information can be encoded in a humanas well as machine-readable way. In this thesis, I investigate the ways that the spatial notions of figure, ground, path and manner of motion are realized in Urdu/Hindi and I implement these insights in a computationally-usable lexical resource, namely Urdu/Hindi VerbNet. I show that in particular the encoding of complex predicates can serve as a guiding principle for the encoding of similar constructions in other VerbNets. This enterprise involves a detailed investigation of the syntax-semantics interface of motion verb constructions in Urdu/Hindi, in particular the different syntactic alternation patterns that realize motion events. As it turns out, Urdu/Hindi employs complex predicates of motion that denote the manner of motion along a path with two verbal heads. This construction exhibits similar syntactic properties as aspectual complex predicates in the language (Butt 1995). The thesis shows that the combinatorial possibilities between main verb and light verb are driven by the manner/result complementarity established by Levin and Rappaport Hovav (2008, 2013), according to which verbs either lexicalize non-scalar manner of motion or denote a scalar result event. An analysis of the construction in Lexical-Functional Grammar (Bresnan and Kaplan 1982, Dalrymple 2001) shows that the two predicates merge their arguments at the level of argument structure, which in turn can be mapped onto the functional representation along the lines of Bresnan and Zaenen (1990). From a typological point of view, the combination of two verbal heads denoting manner of motion along a path in a monoclausal construction shows that Urdu/Hindi belongs to the group of equipollently-framed languages (Slobin 2004, 2005).