This research was carried out as a Senior Fellow of the International School of Dravidian Linguistics, Trivandrum in 1977-78. I am grateful to the authorities of the School and to Prof. V. I. Subramoniam, who gave me the honour of being the Senior Fellow of the School and with his characteristic restlessness and reproaches retrieved me from my repose to bring this study to a wider audience. It was a conflict between my sense of timeless-ness and the demands of a time bound project. I thank his forbearance and kindness. I will be satisfied if this work satisfies at least partially his expectations of me.
I am grateful to the Central Institute of Indian Languages and to Dr. D. P. Pattanayak, who gave me leave for a year to pursue this study, affiliated me to the Institute and provided me the facilities of its library. He loves work and those who work. He will be happy that I have worked. He will be happier if more works come out of this.
I owe much to the seen and unseen scholars who outnumber those expressly acknowledged in the references and whose work has influenced my thinking on the subject. I am thankful to the colleagues at the Institute, to the participants in the Seminar on Dravidian Aspectual System which I organised on behalf of the School in Bangalore in May 1977 and to the students and scholars who attended my lectures on the subject at the School in Trivandrum in January 1978, whose questions clarified my thinking.
Behind every achievement there is a wife who has made sacrifices. I promise Nageswari that I will do better next time to minimise her hardships.
I dedicate this work to Prof. T. P. Meenakshisundaran, who first gave me the key to the wonderland of language and made me explore its mysteries.
Jules Bloch (1954) has remarked that the Indian Languages are not rich in verbal inflexion. This is a narrow morphological view of the grammar. The Indian languages, particularly the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, have a closed set of verbs added to the stem or participle of the main verb, some of which at least carry the function of inflexional suffixes in other languages. The study of these verbs, variously known as auxiliary verbs (Agesthialingom, 1966), explicators (Bahl, 1967), secondary verbs (Subbarao, 1979), vectors (Bhat, 1979) etc., or as compound verbs (Hook, 1974), serial verbs (Kachru) etc., in construction with the main verb, has recently received greater attention from linguists. Their study is interesting from the descriptive point of view because of their special syntactic and semantic characteristics, from the historical point of view because of their areal distribution across genetic families (Masica, 1976; Hook, 1977) and from the applicational point of view in the areas of second language teaching and translation because of their common features and inter-translatability between the Indian languages. The present study is restricted to a descriptive study of the semantics of these auxiliary verbs in relation to their corresponding main verbs.
The semantics of the extended verbs in Tamil, as the verb sequence has been referred to in this study, needs detailed discussion since it is often mistakenly equated with one grammatical notion such as aspect. The following Chapters will clearly show that it is misguided. One could assign the meaning of aspect to one or two of the auxiliary verbs, the meaning of modal to one or two and other meanings to the remaining. But it does not explain why all the different meanings should be expressed syntactically in the same way. Nevertheless, the answer to the question whether there is at present any common semantic feature to all the extended verbs is difficult to give. Their commonness may be in their originating as expressions of sequential events and their differences may be in the meanings of the auxiliary verbs each of whose semantic and syntactic development followed a separate course. This would argue that the extended verbs could be better under-stood in a developmental or dynamic framework.
T. SERIES
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