Indo-Aryan Compound Verbs: Complex Lexical Construct Compound verbs (henceforth CV) in Indo-Aryan languages are composed of two

verbs: pole which is either a participial form as in Bangla, Odiya and Assamese or a root as in Hindi, and vector or light verb which bears the inflection. For example, Bangla meeTa he-e Hindi lDkI hs uTh-I girl laugh-pf rise 3 pt The girl burst into laughter Every Indo-Aryan language has a fixed set of V2s. Scholars including Butt [1995], Dasgupta [1989] have viewed the composition of CVs at the level of syntax by unifying the member of verbs. Even though the constituents of compound verbs enjoy significant syntactic freedom: they can be separated by other lexical terms, one of the constituents of a CV can move leaving the other behind and so on, the paper contents that these constructs are not syntactically composed. Following Ackerman and Webelhuths (1998) lexicalist proposal which they have developed in terms of the construct predicate, compound verbs in this paper are treated as derived lexical variant of their pole constituent. They are the contenttheoretic head of a clause. The paper develops a theory of lexical composition of syntactic and semantic feature structure of compound verb.
Miriam Butt. 1995. The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu. Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University.

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Probal Dasgupta. 1989. Projective Syntax: Theory and Applications. Deccan College P. G. and Research Institute, Pune. Ackerman Farrell and G. Webelhuth (1998) A Theory of Predicates. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA.