Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (E-Journal)
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    101 research outputs found

    Egocentric questions: The view from Bangla and Hindi-Urdu

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    In Bangla and Hindi-Urdu, we find a kind of question that is grammatically restricted to being about a particular event. This kind of a question consists of a demonstrative pronoun followed by a plain question. We refer to such questions as egocentric questions and to the demonstrative pronoun they con- tain as the egocentric pronoun. The egocentric pronoun picks out an event and the question is about this event. Since the speaker and the hearer need to pick out the event the question is about, such questions cannot be used in a state of speaker ignorance. This differentiates them from plain questions where speaker ignorance is the default. We show that various properties of egocentric questions follow from the need to be able to assign a reference to the egocentric pronoun and from the nature of access the speaker has to the event that the egocentric pronoun picks out.&nbsp

    Gender Agreement in a Tamil-Hindi Bilingual Situation: The Role of Feature Valuation

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    Within the Generative paradigm, variation is understood in terms of features. A crucial mechanism for this is the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture, explained in Baker (2008) as: ‘All parameters of variation are attributable to differences in the features of particular items in the lexicon.’ This paper is an attempt to understand a case of asymmetric bilingualism of Hindi-Urdu (Indo-Aryan) and Tamil (Dravidian) and to explain the resultant changes in gender agreement in terms of featural configurations of functional heads. The empirical core is set in New Delhi, with simultaneous bilinguals acquiring Tamil (L1) at home and Hindi-Urdu (L2) from the external environment. While both grammars mark gender information on the verb, Hindi-Urdu has grammatical and biological gender. In Tamil, on the other hand, gender is purely semantic. The Hindi- Urdu grammar of this bilingual population appears to find gender agreement challenging. This paper adopts a representational approach; the loss of Gender is analysed as the deletion of an uninterpretable valued feature on a functional head. The first approach is to posit the uninterpretability of the feature as the cause of deletion. The inability of this claim to hold up empirically is then taken to mean that the explanation for the deletion of the feature lies in its other property: Value. Reanalysis of the change in contact situations reveals that losing valued features could simply be a strategy adopted by languages in an effort to be more parsimonious.&nbsp

    The unique functionality of Urdu light verb jaa and Voice head variation

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    Variation in the properties and structural position of Hindi-Urdu light verbs is well-established. Similar accounts across the literature agree on three positions within the verbal spine: a lower v/V position, an intermediate position, and a high external-argument-introducing head (see Butt & Ramchand, 2005; Suliman, 2015; Sobolak, 2023). In this paper, we add light verb jaa to this discussion. Specifically, we show that jaa occupies an external-argument-introducing Voice head, using evidence from instrumental causers in jaa-constructions. We also show that, within the Voice head typology, Voice-jaa is distinct from the canonical active and passive Voice heads, and is, in fact, akin to Voice in marked anticausatives

    ‘-Te/-e’marker as a plural in Bangla

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      The current work deals with the morphological marker -Te/-e in Bangla. It analyzes the form, function, and structural position of the marker and proposes that, among various other roles, this marker yields the interpretation of a plural marker in restricted contexts. This study further claims that along with -raa, -Te is another associative plural in the language found with conjoined DPs with added ‘collective’ or ‘together’ semantics. This claim becomes interesting in the backdrop of Bangla being a classifier language. This novel proposal deconstructs the dominant thesis regarding the absence of plural in a numeral classifier language. It also suggests that the definition of the plural is much more varied than what has been discussed in the literature.&nbsp

    Language contact and sound change: Reasons for mutual unintelligibility between formal and colloquial registers of Tamil

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    Tamil has since its origination been diglossic, separating the formal high register from the colloquial low register. These two registers are currently mutually unintelligible (Shanmugam Pillai 1965). This analysis explores the reasons why they became unintelligible, which are proposed to be two-fold: historic language contact between Tamil and Sanskrit; and sound changes demonstrated using the Comparative Method. It has been suggested that the decline in mutual intelligibility is due to the removal of Sanskrit loanwords from the formal high register during the Tamil Purist Movement of the 20th century (Kailasapathy 1979). The earliest evidence of Tamil and Sanskrit reciprocal borrowing dates to the first Tamil literary works (Krishnamurti 2003). Where and when this language contact occurred is unclear, but it may have occurred during overlapping occupation of the Indus River Valley region by Sanskrit and Proto-Dravidian (Steever 2009). During the 20th century, the formal register replaced these loanwords with Tamil equivalents wherever possible (Kailasapathy 1979). Currently, low register Tamil is composed of 50% loanwords whereas high register Tamil is composed of only 20% loanwords (Krishnamurti 2003). It has been attested, however, that some diglossia was present before contact between Tamil and Sanskrit. Early diglossia can thus instead be explained by sound changes, which also account for current differences between the registers not attributed to loanwords. Sound changes identified in this analysis include: syncope, apocope, paragoge, stop to fricative lenition, and others. This analysis finds that language contact and sound changes contributed to the decline in intelligibility between formal and colloquial Tamil, however the nature of the language contact is still under investigation

    The internal syntax of -iva clauses in Vedic Sanskrit

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    In this paper we argue that a proper characterization of the synchronic internal syntax of clauses of comparison in Vedic Sanskrit can clarify issues of interpretation. We also briefly explore aspects of the diachrony of these structures.&nbsp

    A Preliminary Description of vanthu in Spoken Tamil

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    Although vanthu has only been described as a filler word or discourse marker in spoken Tamil, this word is being used in various grammatical functions in colloquial Tamil speech. An analysis of the syntactic constraints and distribution of The occurrences of vanthu in one Tamil speaker shows that vanthu is being used primarily as a topic marker, then as a copula, a discourse marker, and a quotative. This analysis of vanthu suggests a change in progress occurring in colloquial spoken Tamil and confirms the necessity of more formal linguistic analysis to be done in this informal register of Tamil speech which can reveal phenomena that cannot be observed in formal or written registers of Tamil.&nbsp

    Dependent dative case in Hindi-Urdu

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    While dative case has traditionally been analysed as a case assigned to a DP by a head (Chomsky 1981, 1986; Woolford 2001, 2006), Baker & Vinokurova (2010) and Baker (2015) have argued that dative case in Sakha is a dependent case in the sense of Marantz (1991). Following Baker & Vinokurova (2010)’s analysis of Sakha, this paper proposes a dependent case analysis of dative case in Hindi-Urdu, based on crucial evidence from the causativised ingestive construction. This account is novel support for the view that dative case may be a dependent case in some languages

    Processing of stacked NPs in embedded sentences in Malayalam

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    The paper examines the effect of stacked NPs in centre-embedded sentences in Malayalam and uses the experimental results to compare two theories of processing difficulty: Gibson (2000)’s Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) and Hale (2001)’s Surprisal Theory. Crucially, the study also looks at the definite vs. non-definite NP distinction in Malayalam in a stacked NP context. Non-definiteness in Malayalam is indicated by having the determiner oru before the noun; a non-definite NP in a centre-embedded sentence disrupts NP stacking. A self-paced reading task is run using single and double-embedded sentences in Malayalam with the embedded NP alternating between definite and non-definite conditions. The test is designed to determine if (i) stacked NPs in a centre-embedded sentence result in a processing difficulty (ii) having oru preceding an NP affects processing. The results showed that processing difficulty increases with the addition of each NP; NPs from the embedded clauses take longest to be read. When the embedded NP is preceded by oru, reaction time significantly drops at oru and the following NP, indicating that the determiner facilitated integration of theNP, disrupting NP stacking. The results were compared against the predictions of DLT and Surprisal models. We found that the anticipation based Surprisal account best accounted for the results for Malayalam.&nbsp

    DOM in Kodava takk: a complex interaction among multiple factors

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    This paper presents novel data from Kodava takk (Dravidian), also known as Coorgi, which exhibits the well-attested syntactic phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM). Crosslinguistically, objects which are differentially marked tend to be associated with features such as specificity and/or definiteness, humanness, animacy, or a combination of these. Well- known examples of specificity-driven DOM include Turkish (von Heusinger and Kornfilt 2005) and Senaya (Kalin 2018), whereas direct objects in Spanish (Ormazabal & Romero 2013) and Hindi (Dayal 2011, Bhatt & Anagnostopolou 1996) receive differential marking on the grounds of animacy/humanness and specificity. As will be illustrated, this phenomenon is most definitely present in Coorgi, as the accusative case-marker does not always appear on direct objects. However, on the surface, there is no clear-cut featural split between objects which do and do not receive this case-marker. Instead, this differential marking is triggered by a complex interaction of multiple factors: animacy, specificity, number, humanness, and inherent lexical properties of verbs. This paper outlines the interactions which derive Differential Object Marking in Coorgi and offers a formal analysis to capture the empirical facts, which modifies Kalin’s (2018) account where DOM is a result of nominal licensing. This paper not only provides complex novel data from an understudied and endangered language, but also deepens our understanding of this crosslinguistic phenomenon, and calls into question the role grammatical Number plays in Differential Object Marking.&nbsp

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