A Comparative Analysis of Verb Phrase Structures in English and Hindi

By : Bhawesh Kumar Bhargav

Page No: 101-105

Abstract
The present paper aims at critically examining the verb phrase (VP) structure in English and Hindi, the two languages commonly used by an educated Indian, particularly in the Hindi speaking belt of India. Gone are the days of traditional grammars which study sentences in terms of subject and predicate or consisting of a principal clause and subordinate clauses - subordinate noun clauses, subordinate adjective clauses and subordinate adverb clauses. Traditional Grammar by F.T. Wood, Thomson and Martinate, J.C. Nesfield and many others discuss the structure of English language in a very restricted and limited manner and fail to answer many significant questions.
That was the period when language studies came under philology. With the term linguistics getting popular in the first half of the 20th century, the whole approach to language studies underwent dramatic change. The theory of transformational generative (TG) grammar, as well as the application of this theory to a specific language which started in 1940’s and led the way for serious discussions in linguistic literature.
It has now generally been accepted that Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957), introduced a serious rethinking and an evaluation of the then current general linguistic theories. And later, when Robert Lees’ The Grammar of English Nominalisation (1960) appeared, it demonstrated in detail, the power of transformational theory for the description of a particular language. In recent times, a large number of western and non-western languages have been analysed following this theoretical frame-work. As a result, extremely valuable insights have been gained into the human language behaviour in general and more specifically into the workings of particular languages. This also led to analyse languages in a scientifically oriented linguistic manner. More and more contrastive and comparative studies of English were conducted in relation to other languages and dialects. Such syntactic studies are not only confined to theoretical linguistics or syntax; they become more significant, meaningful, and useful in the area of Applied Linguistics as well.

Author :
Bhawesh Kumar Bhargav
Ph.D. (English), T.M.B.U., Bhagalpur

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32381/POET.2021.34.01.14