Indus Kohistani Dictionary: Body Parts, Bodily Processes, Sickness and Medicine

This paper contributes to the description of the Indus Kohistani language of Pakistan by presenting a list of terms—along with their English glosses—that are used in this language to refer to body parts, bodily processes, sickness and medicine

A relevance-based analysis of two multifunctional discourse particles: Indus Kohistani hum and –ãĩ

Relevance theory claims that words encode different types of meaning: concepts or procedures. Within this framework, discourse connectors are understood as encoding procedural instructions for the inferential part of utterance comprehension. This analysis allows for a unitary account of particles with seemingly diverse functions. Following Blass (1990) in her study of Sissala ma, English also and German auch, I examine the two discourse particles hum and –ãĩ of Indus Kohistani, a language spoken in Northern Pakistan. Both of them encode procedural meaning in that they exclude backwards contradiction as a possible way of utterance interpretation, but allow backwards confirmation and additive processing. This analysis applies to the full range of data and thus supports the interpretation of such particles as procedural devices indicating in which way to achieve relevance

A Description And Analysis Of Four Metarepresentation Markers Of Indus Kohistani

This thesis describes and analyzes four markers of Indus Kohistani, a language spoken in Northern Pakistan that has received little attention so far. The markers discussed are lee, a hearsay evidential that does however not mark every reported speech, karee, a grammaticalized quotative and complementizer that is also found in purpose and reason clauses, in naming and in similarity constructions, če, a complementizer borrowed from Pashto, and loo, a marker that indicates utterances a speaker wishes her audience to convey to a third party. Relevance Theory, an inferential theory of communication, distinguishes between utterances that are descriptions or representations of a state of affairs and utterances that are the representations of another representation like speech or thought, i.e. metarepresentations. This distinction allows for an analysis within this framework that shows one underlying meaning common to all four markers: all are used as indicators of metarepresentation. What distinguishes them is the kind of metarepresentation they point out. The evidential lee indicates metarepresentation of attributed utterances; karee marks attributed and self-attributed thoughts and utterances; the complementizer če indicates the same metarepresentations while gradually replacing karee; and the marker loo metarepresentations of desirable utterances, a non-attributive type of metarepresentation. Furthermore, I suggest that the evidential lee also activates the cognitive assessment mechanism of an addressee, providing input for the evaluation of the communicated information, namely its source. A speaker will use lee when what she communicates is the report of rather unusual events, to show herself as trustworthy and to hand over some of the responsibility of assessment to the addressee. This study uses data from collected narrative and non-narrative recorded texts as well as from recorded conversations; it includes a short sketch of Indus Kohistani typological features