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{{Short description|Indian linguist}}
{{Orphan|date=December 2021}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Tara Mohanan
| occupation = Linguist, entrepreneur
}}

'''Tara Mohanan''' is a [[linguistics|linguist]] and co-founder of ThinQ, an educational organisation.<ref>{{cite web |title=People |url=https://www.thinq.education/people |website=ThinQ: Think, Inspire, Question |publisher=ThinQ |access-date=16 December 2021 |date=2020}}</ref> She is known for work on [[Hindi]], [[Malayalam]], and other South Asian languages in the fields of [[semantics]], [[syntax]], [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphology]], and [[phonology]]. Her husband is linguist [[K. P. Mohanan (linguist)|K. P. Mohanan]].

== Academic career ==
Mohanan did her Bachelor's and Master's in English Literature at [[Calicut University]], followed by an MLitt. in Linguistics at the [[Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages]] (now EFLU). Mohanan completed her doctorate in linguistics at [[Stanford University]] in 1990, with her thesis entitled ''Arguments in Hindi''. In that, she introduced a unique grammatical formalism to describe Hindi syntax based on empirical data.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Ramchand |first1=Gillian |title=Tara Mohanan, Argument structure in Hindi. (Dissertations in Linguistics.) Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1994. Pp. 269. |journal=Journal of Linguistics |date=1996 |volume=32 |issue=2 |pages=530–532 |doi=10.1017/S0022226700016066 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|s2cid=145604682 }}</ref> She taught linguistics at the [[National University of Singapore]] until 2006, where she designed an undergraduate program in linguistics with K. P. Mohanan.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Singh |first1=Praveen |title=Praveen Singh (PS) Talks to Dr. Tara Mohanan (TM) |journal=Language and Language Teaching |date=2020 |volume=9 |issue=2 |page=59 |url=https://llt.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/LLT18.pdf}}</ref>

=== Contributions to Hindi syntax ===
Mohanan's dissertation, ''Arguments in Hindi'' (published as a book entitled ''Argument Structure in Hindi'' in 1994), has had a lasting influence on the study of the syntax of Hindi and other South Asian languages. Some of the major issues in Hindi linguistics that she considers in her dissertation are:
* [[Case marking]]: notably, [[differential object marking]] with the Hindi accusative case marker ''ko''.
* [[Verb agreement]]: including foundational theoretical work on the noun + verb construction in Hindi, analysed as [[object incorporation]].
* [[Quirky subject|Non-nominative subjects]]: claims that Hindi has genitive and dative-marked subjects, besides the prototypical nominative/ergative-marked one.

Her later paper on [[object incorporation]] in Hindi further expanded her theoretical separation of grammatical categories and grammatical functions: a case-less object + verb construction in Hindi could be analysed as serving the function of the verb, while retaining syntactic properties that allow the verb to agree with the incorporated noun.<ref>{{Harvcoltxt|Mohanan|1995}}</ref> She distinguished this from the [[complex predicate]] in Hindi, wherein a noun + verb or verb + verb construction results in combined argument structure that neither could have by itself (e.g. the complex N+V predicate ''yād karnā'' "to remember" in Hindi can take an object of its own).

Her analyses of Hindi complex predicates and incorporated objects has been retained in more recent work, such as that by [[Miriam Butt]] on complex predicates in Urdu–Hindi.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Butt |first1=Miriam |chapter=The Light Verb Jungle: Still Hacking Away |date=2010 |title=Complex Predicates: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Event Structure |editor1=Mengistu Amberber |editor2=Brett Baker |editor3=Mark Harvey |url=https://www.ling.uni-konstanz.de/typo3temp/secure_downloads/82191/0/8710d896f59e60896f41c1882246f4d0d72ec32c/cp-volume.pdf }}{{Dead link|date=July 2025 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> Modern dependency annotation schemes for South Asian languages, which have been used to make [[syntactic parsing (computational linguistics)|syntactically parsed]] treebanks for computational analysis, also reference her work.<ref>{{cite conference|first1=Rafiya|last1=Begum|first2=Samar|last2=Husain|first3=Arun|last3=Dhwaj|first4=Dipti Misra|last4=Sharma|first5=Lakshmi|last5=Bai|first6=Rajeev|last6=Sangal|year=2008|title=Dependency Annotation Scheme for Indian Languages|conference=Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing|url=https://aclanthology.org/I08-2099.pdf}}</ref>

==Works==
* {{cite journal|title=Syllable structure in Malayalam|journal=Linguistic Inquiry|pages=589–625|year=1989|last=Mohanan|first=Tara|author-mask=1|ref=none}}
* {{cite thesis|title=Arguments in Hindi|last=Mohanan|first=Tara|type=PhD|publisher=Stanford University|author-mask=1|year=1990|ref=none}}
* {{cite book|title=Argument structure in Hindi|series=Dissertations in Linguistics|publisher=CSLI Publications|location=Stanford, CA|year=1994|last=Mohanan|first=Tara|author-mask=1|ref=none}}
* {{cite journal|title=Wordhood and lexicality: Noun incorporation in Hindi|journal=Natural Language & Linguistic Theory|volume=13|number=1|pages=75–134|year=1995|last=Mohanan|first=Tara|doi=10.1007/BF00992779|s2cid=170667125|url=http://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/21920 |author-mask=1}}

==References==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==

* [http://www.thinq.education/ ThinQ homepage]

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mohanan, Tara}}
[[Category:Linguists of Hindi]]
[[Category:Dravidologists]]
[[Category:Academic staff of the National University of Singapore]]
[[Category:Stanford University alumni]]
[[Category:University of Calicut alumni]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:Year of birth missing (living people)]]
[[Category:Indian women linguists]]

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Tara Mohanan - Revision history

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