Taking off the Veil of the Janus-faced 'TAKE' ―The Story of 'TAKE' as a Vector in Indic Languages―

ln some Indic languagds, a compound verb involving TAKE as a vector verb conveys radically opposite meanings: "benefactive" and "malefactive". Addressing hitherto unexplored issue ― why "intentional" eventualities like the benefactives and "non-intentional" eventualities like the malefactives are encoded in an identical way ― I offer a principled account for this phenomenon. I claim that clauses using TAKE as a vector verb ― benefactives as well as melefactives ― are causative, and consist of two sub-events: a causing event (E1) and a caused event (E2). This is why they are encoded identically. They differ, however,in terms of the entailment relationship between the causing and the caused event, giving rise to radically opposite meaning. The account proposed herein thus elegantly uncovers the mystery of identical forms yielding opposite meanmg.