Pragmatic Approach to Compound Verbs in Hindi/Urdu: The Case of (Inter)subjectivity.

A number of different semantic and pragmatic factors govern the usage of compound verbs in Hindi/Urdu. In this paper, our focus is to set out and analyze one of the pragmatic factors that has been called ‘(inter)subjectivity’ or ‘prior knowledge’ in detail and see how that correlates to the existing literature on compound verbs and to the emerging study of the codification of surprise (‘mirativity’) in Hindi/Urdu. Our main finding is that compound verb constructions with vector verbs jānā, denā and lenā are used in scenarios where the speaker and the listener are already aware of the event that is being spoken of. That is, the speaker’s and the listener’s minds are ‘prepared’ with respect to the context of the speaker’s utterances.