Dative Case in Telugu: A Parsing Perspective

In this paper we attempt to study various case relations expressed by the case marker -ki/ku in Telugu. This paper represents a small fragment of our efforts at developing a parser for Telugu based on the dependency frame work a la Panini. Though, traditionally the case marked by -ku/-ki is usually called as the dative case, there are a number of semantic/case relations it expresses. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to identify and thereby predict various functions performed by the case marker -ki/-ku in Telugu based on the semantic properties of the nouns and Verbs involved. Such linguistic inputs help in machine learning and building parsers for Telugu for computational purposes.