Light-Verb Innovation and Bilingual Predicate Creativity in Pashto-English: A Morpheme-Level Audit

Abstract Bilingual predicate creativity can involve the distribution of lexical meaning and finite morphology between languages: an English-origin element provides event-related meaning, and a Pashto light verb or copula forms the bilingual predicate and encodes tense, aspect, agreement, and clause structure. This is a secondary morpheme-level audit of English-containing sentences from about eight hours of Pashto-dominant television interaction. The bounded interlinear appendix was screened to reconstruct 41 English-origin predicate candidates: 35 Core cases, with the host verb being Pashto kaw 'do/make' (29) or keg/shw 'become' (5) or the copula (1); five category-ambiguous Sensitivity cases; and one Excluded motion-verb construction. None of the 40 hosted candidates bears overt English tense or agreement morphology. The analysis distinguishes between observable surface form and syntactic category and borrowing status, since English bare forms are categorically ambiguous. The paper proposes a graded Differential Election Hypothesis (DEH) based on the existing low-competition account of embedded-language nonfinite verbs and matrix-language 'do' constructions.