A temporal semantics for Malayalam Conjunctive Participle Constructions

Abstract

This paper asks how the semantics of Conjunctive Participle Constructions are obtained in Malayalam. After providing an overview of the syntactic and pragmatic factors governing the use of this construction, the paper points out the similarity of this Malayalam construction to the English absolutive construction. It suggests that an account like Stump (1985) might be able to account for the Malayalam data. The main conclusion of the paper is that Malayalam Conjunctive Participle Constructions are semantically underspecified for tense and aspect and also probably structurally small.