English grammar from Hindi speaker's point of view in the light of Paaninian grammar

English grammar from Hindi speaker's point of view in the light of Paaninian grammar

Table of Contents

Abstract:

The knowledge of how a language codes information, how much information it codes, and what are the different means of coding the information is very crucial for a computational linguist working on a Machine Translation system.
In this paper we investigate the reasons between the structural differences between English and Hindi from information coding point of view. On the basis of the basic structure for declarative sentences in English and Hindi, we conclude that English does not have a morpheme for an accusative marker. The missing accusative marker is compensated by the subject position in English. As a consequence, this gives rise to some structural differences in the two languages. Next, we point out that, a morphologivcal marker for marking the yes-no question is also missing in English. Therefore English resorts to the word order again. The structural differences arising because of this phenomenon are also discussed.

1) Introduction:

The structural differences between English and Hindi are mostly attributed to the difference in their word orders. Language typologists classify English as an SVO language and Hindi as an SOV language. However comparing English and Hindi on the basis of word order is like comparing apples with oranges! The reason is: English uses position to code crucial information of the relation between the words in a sentence. So when one says English is an SVO language, one is asserting a fact about the encoding of grammatical relations, viz. subject and object, in English. The position immediately preceeding a verb marks the subject and the one immediately following marks an object. On the other hand, Hindi is a relatively free word order language. Hence, when Hindi is termed as a SOV language, one is just stating a statistical fact about the order of words in a typical Hindi sentence!

To make the point clear, following two English sentences have exactly opposite meanings.

	   Rats kill cats
	   Cats kill rats

whereas, the following two Hindi sentences with similar change in the order of words as above, have the same meaning (ignoring the topicalisation, of course).

	H: raama phala khaataa hai.
    gloss: Ram  fruit eats.
        E: Ram eats fruits.


	H: phala raama khaataa hai.
    gloss: Fruit Ram eats.
        E: Ram eats fruits.

In the following sections, we investigate the reasons behind the structural differences between these two languages from information coding point of view. In the second section, on the basis of the basic structure for declarative sentences in English and Hindi, we conclude that English does not have a morpheme for an accusative marker. The missing accusative marker is compensated by the subject position in English. As a consequence, this gives rise to some structural differences in the two languages. The third section discusses these structural differences. In the fourth section, it has been pointed out that, English does not have a morphological marker for marking the yes-no question. Therefore English resorts to the word order again. The structural differences arising because of this phenomenon are discussed in the fifth section.

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2) Missing accusative marker:

Look at the English sentence

	Rats kill dogs.				(1)

and it's Hindi gloss

	cuuhe maara{0} kutte.			(2)

{Note: {0} stands for no overt suffix. There are many interpretations of {0} suffix in English, such as present tense marker, imperative, to-less infinitive, etc. One of them, which is relevant in this particular case is present tense marker. Thus, we may interpret the above Hindi gloss as

 	cuuhe maarate_haiM kutte. 

}

Though this is not a grammatical Hindi sentence, still, if a Hindi reader is asked to interpret this sentence, he will interpret this as

	H: kutte maarate_haiM cuuhoM_ko.		(3)
        E: Dogs  bite  rats.

which is exactly the reverse of what is being said in English!

Why does this happen? First let us try to understand the reason for why a Hindi reader analyses it in this way, and later we will see what mechanism in English triggers the desired meaning.

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Arguments by Hindi reader for this interpretation:

The Hindi sentence (2) is ungrammatical, because Hindi requires an accusative marker (ko) to mark the karma role. However, Hindi also has a tendency to drop the karma vibhakti, wherever there is a possibility of recovering the information from other sources, such as world knowledge. For example, following sentence

	H: raama phala khaataa hai.		(4)
    gloss: Ram  fruit eats.
	E: Ram eats fruits.

does not have an accusative marker with phala. In spite of this, a Hindi reader appealing to the world knowledge (in this case the yogyataa or competancy), interprets this sentence as raama is the kartaa of the action of eating and phala is the karma of the action.

At the same time, Hindi obligatorily requires an accusative marker, if anything against yogyataa is to be communicated, as is obvious from the following Hindi sentence.

	lataa sharaaba nahiiM piitii, sharaaba lataa ko piitii hai.	(5)
[Note the marker 'ko' with lataa, to mark lataa as a karma]

Following the same argument, since sentence(2) does not carry any explicit accusative marker to mark the karma, Hindi reader appeals to his world knowledge, and based on the yogyataa, since the dogs have yogyataa to kill the rats and not the other way, interprets the sentence as (3).

Unlike Hindi, English does not have an explicit morpheme for accusative marker. Rather it codes the information indicating grammatical relations in subject and object positions.

So the natural question is, which position is crucial, the subject position or the object position or both? Or in other words, what is invariant, the S-V order or the O-V order or the S-V-O order?

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Initial Hypothesis (S-V-O order):

Both the subject as well as object positions carry crucial information, or the S-V-O relation is invariant in English.

However, we come across such sentences as

	Who likes sweets? Sweets, I like.		
						(6)
	Mrs. Venables turned a little pale.  
	Lord Peter presented no difficulties, 
	but Bunter she found rather alarming.  
	(source: D. Sayers, The Nine Tailors)

where the object is in topic position, typically either to contrast or to maintain a topic.

Therefore, in this case, the information that sweets is an object of the verb like, is not coded in position or the order. In other words, the orders S-V-O as well as V-O are not invariant.

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Revised Hypothesis (S-V order)

This leads us to reframe the observation as, It is the subject-verb order which is invariant. Objects may move around.

But life is not simple as is expected. There are examples showing movement of subject also!

Here are the examples:

      Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
      Never was the sea so calm!
      Here comes the bus!				(7)
      On the bed, hung a mosquito net.

In the above examples, the head, the sea, the bus and a mosquito net are the subjects of the verbs lies, was, comes, and hung, and not the words that precede the verbs.

However, in all these examples, the verb is monovalent. That is they have an expectancy of only one argument(kaaraka), which agrees with the verb in number and person. therefore, it's position in a sentence is not crucial. However, in case of transitive verbs, there are two arguments, and hence it is necessary to mark at least one of them. From the above examples, what we observe is, in case of transitive verbs, subject is always to the left of the verb, or in other words, S-V order is invariant!

There are evidences, which go against this hypothesis also. Look at

	Something had to give. And give it did.
								(8)
	Last October our good friend in South Africa, 
	Ted Oliver, recommended Dolf Schumann to get in 
	touch with me as he wanted to come to England 
	this year and come he did, with his wife Annie.

	We all said she was bound to leave him, and leave him she did.

	She could only hope that Harriet was mistaken in his feelings... 
	Wish it she must, for his sake... (J. Austen, Emma)

	Ride in a taxi with Pamela and Bredon he could not, even if it 
	meant losing her forever... (D. Sayers, Murder must Advertise)
In all these examples, the subject is after the verb phrase! But at the same time, we also note that subject is followed by an auxiliary! So finally it is the subject-auxiliary sannidhi (proximity) that is invariant in English. The normal sannidhi (proximity) between auxiliary verbs and the main verb gets violated in English, and a new sannidhi is created between a subject and an auxiliary verb.

This leads to a concept of 'Subject Position' - a position which is to the immediate left of the auxiliary verb, or the main verb (in case auxiliary verb is absent). And thus, we revise our observation as:

Final Observation:

In case of transitive verbs, the missing accusative marker in English has been compensated by the Subject Position.

Since English codes crucial information in subject position, this subject position can not be empty. This constraint then leads to many consequences that lead to more structural differences between English and Hindi as explained below.

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3) Consequences of missing accusative marker:

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4) Missing yes-no interrogative marker:

Look at the following two sentences in English:

        E: Ram is going to school.         -- (47)
and
        E: Is Ram going to school?         -- (48)

One of the sentences is declarative whereas the other one is a yes-no question. If we look at the words in the sentences, they are same, except for the word order. So it is natural that the information of 'interrogativeness' or 'declarativeness' of the sentence is in the word order. There is no explicit morpheme to mark the interrogativeness.

From the Hindi translations of these sentences

        H: raama skuula jaa rahaa hai.             -- (49)
and
        H: kyaa raama skuula jaa rahaa hai?        -- (50)

it is clear that Hindi has an explicit word 'kyaa' to mark the 'yes-no' question. The counterpart of this morpheme is missing in English. As a consequence, English codes this information in word order.

Observation:
The missing marker corresponding to yes-no question is compensated by the 'subject-auxiliary verb inversion' in English.

The consequence of this is that the normal sannidhi (proximity) between auxiliary verbs and the main verb is weakened, and a new sannidhi is established between the subject and the auxiliary verb.

5) Consequences of Missing yes-no interrogative marker:

6) Conclusion:

The whole purpose of this exercise is to look at the structural differences between English and Hindi from an information theoretic point of view. The major reason behind the structural differences between English and Hindi is the absence of accusative marker and yes-no marker in English. To compensate for this absence, English resorts to the word order. This further gives rise to more structural differences between the two languages.
We conclude that a Hindi reader while reading a English text has to 'tune' himeself to the following: a) Acquire a new 'vrutti' -- the 'quazi compound' _V_, and b) do away with the normal 'sannidhi' (proximity) between a verb and its auxiliary and also between a noun and its post-position (which are integral part of Indian langauges), and acquire new 'sannidhi's: i) between subject and auxiliary and ii) between a verb and its preposition.
Notes:

References:

  1. Radford Andrew, Syntax: A minimallist Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2002
  2. Sag Ivan A. & Thomas Wasow, Syntactic Theory: A formal Introduction, CSLI publications, 1999
  3. Comrie Bernard, Language Universals & Linguistic Typology, The University of Chicago Press, 1989
  4. Bharati Akshar, Vineet Chaitanya, Rajeev Sangal, 'Natural Langauge Processing: A Paninian perspective', Prentice Hall, New delhi, 1995
  5. Bharati Akshar, Vineet Chaitanya, Rajeev Sangal, 'Paaninian ..' Delhi,1998
  6. hinxii kaa vyaakarana: Dr. Surajbhan Singh
  7. http://www.hf.ntnu.no/engelsk/staff/johannesson/111gram/lect17.htm