Subjecthood in Pāṇini’s grammatical tradition

According to the common opinion, there is no place for the grammatical category of subject in Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. This is due to the fact that, according to many scholars of Pāṇini, Sanskrit lacks this category in its grammar. However, if we take into consideration a wider view of what Pāṇini’s grammar is and what language it presupposes, we can conclude that speaking of subject becomes more sensible, especially if we take into account some subjecthood features that so far have not been used in this respect. I conclude that, if not Pāṇini himself, some later commentators could have had a notion very similar to subject in their linguistic background, which induced them to interpret Pāṇini’s theories so that the idea of subjecthood eventually surfaced

A Formal Analysis of Inflectional Marking in the Albanian Noun Phrase

Kenneth E. Naylor AwardThe Albanian noun phrase marks four morphosyntactic properties: number, gender, case, and definiteness. Every lexical word in the phrase mark number and gender, but only the first lexical word in the phrase—either a noun (1) or an adjective (2)—marks case and definiteness. (1) vajz-at e mir-a girl-NOM.DEF.PL.F NOM.DEF.PL.F good-PL.F 'the good girls' (2) e mir-at vajz-a NOM.DEF.PL.F good-NOM.DEF.PL.F girl-PL.F 'the good girls Number and gender are straightforwardly morphological, but the placement of case and definiteness is dependent upon the syntax. In this way, this exponent is a clitic. The Albanian clitic is especially informative about the morphology-syntax interface because of its "special" (Zwicky 1977) placement after the first lexical word, or second position (2P), and its cumulative exponence. There are many models of 2P clitic placement that treat 2P clitics as phrasal affixes, notably Halpern (1995) and Anderson (2005), but the Albanian clitic's cumulative exponence poses a problem for these models due to its noncanonical nature. In this thesis, I develop an analysis of the clitic using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) that accounts for the clitic as edge inflection, rather than treating it as phrasal affixation. The clitic's cumulative exponence results in two paradigms for lexemes depending on their location within the phrase; when the word is in first position, it marks a larger set of properties than when it is in subsequent positions. This poses a problem to morphology, as it suggests morphology is privy to syntactic placement. In this thesis, I develop an analysis using Paradigm Function Morphology that allows morphology to remain blind to phrasal position.Undergraduate Research ScholarshipNo embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic

Tibetan Grammar: Si tu Paṇchen and the Tibetan adoption of linguistic knowledge from India

The present dissertation is a critical study of key grammatical concepts in the linguistic tradition of eighteenth century Tibet. It addresses the question, how Tibetan grammarians adopted and, in the process, modified Sanskritic grammatical knowledge for the analysis of the written Tibetan language. The investigation is centered on the topic of case grammar and focuses on the work of Si tu Paṇchen Chos kyi ’byung gnas (1700-1774), a relatively late author who claims the status of a Sanskrit expert and one of the most important grammarians in the tradition. Important findings of the thesis suggest that multiple, sometimes competing factors (historical, linguistic, conceptual, methodological) interacted in the Tibetan adoption of the Sanskritic case model. This adoption was neither direct nor uncritical, but mediated by Tibetan grammarians through the theoretical and methodological foundation of Tibetan case grammar, in particular the case functions' validity across languages. The study reveals significant transformations of originally Sanskritic linguistic knowledge, including the understanding of the notion of case (rnam dbye, vibhakti) as such, as well as the conception of cases. The study also highlights the heterogeneity of the Tibetan grammatical tradition and the constant re-negotiation of adopted terminology and theories throughout the centuries. The main purpose of the current work is to raise awareness that this area of Tibetan intellectual history deserves closer attention with regard to both our understanding of Tibetan grammatical models in particular and Tibetan scholastic knowledge production in general. From a broader perspective, this dissertation serves as a case study of the processes and mechanisms that are involved in the travel of concepts – in this particular case grammatical concepts – across cultural-linguistic boundaries

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages

Stemming from the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project that ran in Cambridge (UK) in 2011-2014 and led to the cataloguing and partial digitization of the rich collections of South Asian manuscripts in the University Library, these essays explore the manuscript culture of India and beyond – Nepal, Cambodia, Tibet – from a variety of angles: books as artefacts, works of art, commodities, staples of tradition, and of course as repositories of knowledge

Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages

Stemming from the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project that ran in Cambridge (UK) in 2011-2014 and led to the cataloguing and partial digitization of the rich collections of South Asian manuscripts in the University Library, these essays explore the manuscript culture of India and beyond – Nepal, Cambodia, Tibet – from a variety of angles: books as artefacts, works of art, commodities, staples of tradition, and of course as repositories of knowledge