A Psycho-Acoustical Exploration of Multi-verb Constructions in Bengali Speech Rhythms
摘要
Multi-verb constructions occur very frequently in most South-Asian languages and have been documented to a large extent. In this work, we focus our attention to multi-verb formations in Bengali language, which are essentially categorized into complex predicate construction (CPC) and serial verb construction (SVC). We aim to quantify and categorize, both acoustically and perceptually, the event construals manifested by the SVCs and CPCs in Bengali. This paper comprises an elaborate study of robust acoustic features to establish a classification paradigm to distinguish between the event construals of CPCs and SVCs. A human behavioural analysis is performed to establish the perceptual entrenchment for the two unique verb forms in Bengali. We also establish that the distinction between the event packaging of CPCs and SVCs bears no attestation at the phonological level.