An attempt to understand the encoding of reduced transitivity in Hindi: the case of compound verbs with jānā

Since the 1960s much attention has been paid to the categorization and development of the so-called New Indo-Aryan ‘compound verbs’. As a conse-quence, we possess numerous investigations on this topic of linguistic research. However, although there are many analysis devoted to the semantic contrast of the compound as opposed to the simple verb, it is rather surprising that no sig-nificant research has been conducted to investigate the semantic contrast be-tween the use of different vector verbs with the same polar verb. The main aim of the paper is to understand the factors involved in this choice, in particular if these factors are semantic or pragmatic. The analysis is a synchronic one, grounded in a corpus-based research starting from data taken from present-day original Hindi sources and focused on the two Hindi polar transitive verbs khānā ‘to eat’ and pīnā ‘to drink’ compounded with the vector intransitive one jānā ‘to go’.