On the interaction of aspect and ability in two Hindi/Urdu constructions

Abstract

Complex predicates with the Hindi/Urdu light verb le (‘take’) show an unexpected pattern of interpretation in composition with grammatical aspect. Perfective le has a completive meaning (Singh 1990), but a dispositional (modal) interpretation arises in the imperfective (Butt 1997). This paper pursues a unified analysis of le: I compare le predicates to uses of the English implicative manage, and its aspectual alternation to the actuality entailments of the Hindi/Urdu ability modal sak (Bhatt 1999). The account builds on prior work (Nadathur 2023a,b) to argue that all three predicates share reference to a complex causal structure, predicting the observed patterns of interpretation in combination with the contrastive semantics of (im)perfective aspects.