BILINGUAL COMPOUND VERBS AND LIGHT VERBS INNOVATION IN PASHTO-ENGLISH CODE-MIXING

Abstract

The present study focuses on the bilingual compound verb, which is as an innovative syntactic category emerges through Pashto-English code mixing (hereafter CM). The study shows that Bilingual Compound Verbs (BCVs) are very prevalent in the Pashto-English CM of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The study explored that the BCVs in Pashto is completely productive and do not entail phonologically and semantically in the morphosyntax of Pashto language. It also shows that the dominant pattern of BCVs is the conjugation of the lights verbs kaw ‘do’ or ‘make’ keg ‘become’ which carries the aspectual and agreement markers and the left-most alien lexical element contributes to the core semantic content of the construction. The BCVs construction show that how the light verbs lead to a new verbal category.