Semantic Processing of Compounds in Indian Languages

Compounds occur very frequently in Indian Languages. There are no strict orthographic conventions for compounds in modern Indian Languages. In this paper, Sanskrit compounding system is examined thoroughly and the insight gained from the Sanskrit grammar is applied for the analysis of compounds in Hindi and Marathi. It is interesting to note that compounding in Hindi deviates from that in Sanskrit in two aspects. The data analysed for Hindi does not contain any instance of Bahuvrīhi (exo-centric) compound. Second, Hindi data presents many cases where quite a lot of compounds require a verb as well as vibhakti(a case marker) for its paraphrasing. Compounds requiring a verb for paraphrasing are termed as madhyama-pada-lopī in Sanskrit, and they are found to be rare in Sanskrit