SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is a Descriptive Analysis of Verbs in Malto, a poorly documented North Dravidian language with about 60,000 speakers living on the Rajmahal Hills in Eastern India. Malto is an agglutinating language with SOV word order. The finite verb word in Malto maximally carries information about valence adjusting operations, tense-aspect- mood, negation and gender-number-person agreement with the subject. The non-finite verbs take suffixes marking adverbialisation, complementation, relativisation, conjunct participialisation and relative tense. Syntactically, there is only one finite verb in a sentence and all the other verbs preceding it are non-finite. Malto has a range of multi-verb constructions that includes explicator compound verbs, conjunct participle constructions, reduplicated adverbials, verbal complementisation, clause chaining and quotative verbal constructions. This work includes a detailed analysis of the formal structure of verbs, valence adjusting operations, tense-aspect-mood, negation and multi-verb constructions in Malto along with a concluding chapter on the language contact and convergence situation. The synchronic data collected during fieldwork is discussed in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar and complemented by inputs from typological studies and a historical linguistic perspective in relation to Dravidian languages.