Experiential constructions in Hindi: the encoding of perceptions and bodily sensations

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, I offer a description of argument-structure constructions of experiential verbs in Hindi, analyzing their syntactic and semantic properties, with a focus on the encoding of two experiential subdomains: perceptions and bodily sensations, the two most semantically different experiential event types (Luraghi, Silvia. 2020. Experiential verbs in Homeric Greek, a constructional approach (Brill’s Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture 27). Boston: Brill; Malchukov, Andrej L. 2005. Case pattern splits, verb types and construction competition. In Mengistu Amberber & Helen de Hoop (eds.), Perspectives on cognitive science, competition and variation in natural languages, 73–117. Amsterdam: Elsevier; Tsunoda, Tasaku. 2015. The hierarchy of two-place predicates: Its limitations and uses. In Andrej L. Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 2, 1597–1626. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). I rely on data taken from a corpus consisting of Hindi literary texts of the 20th century, interrogated through Sketch Engine and I follow the approach of Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press; Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction grammar and its applications to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 is an introduction giving the aim of the paper with some remarks on methodological and theoretical issues. Section 2 is a preliminary introduction on the domain of Experience and its encoding strategies. In Section 3, I give some remarks on case in Hindi, and I discuss the semantic–syntactic interplay in the language and the concept of iconicity, which is central in the paper. In Section 4, I present Hindi data and their analysis, focusing firstly on perception verbs (Section 4.1) and then on bodily sensation verbs (Section 4.2). In the last section (Section 5), I draw some conclusions trying to give an account of the type-frequency of each pattern, in order to evaluate the possible semantic constraints of each construction, and I propose a constructionist explanation of the distribution of Hindi argument-structure constructions across the highly variable range of experiential events.