The grammatical life of property concepts in Malayalam

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2018

2018

With this short paper I want to pay tribute to Dany and his extremely inspiring dissertation Operators in the lexicon (henceforth OiL). In my own dissertation I did not refer to his work explicitly but the impact his work had on my thinking cannot be underestimated. In 2011, I started exploring the idea that Dany’s OiL is actually morphologically reflected in how quantifiers are built in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in India. Moreover, I realized how Jaspers’ decomposition of the lexicon in terms of operators meshes well with a nanosyntactic approach, a framework that I learned about in the course of that same year. At the time, I wrote a 2-page abstract on this, but never submitted it to any conference, because I considered the ideas immature. The present paper takes a stab at developing these ideas from years ago a bit further and most importantly, wants to show that the abstract formal operators presented in Jaspers (2005) are a morphological reality in some languages s...

This paper discusses the effects of variation in the meaning of property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon 1982) on the form of predicative and comparative constructions. We demonstrate the existence of two kinds of PC lexeme, which differ systematically in how they participate in constructions expressing the truth conditions of property concept predication. The first kind of lexeme is used in canonical predicative constructions, the other in predicative constructions which invoke possessive morphology or syntax. The differences between the two classes are observable both within a single language and crosslinguistically. The paper argues that the morphosyntactic differences in the behavior of the two lexeme types is predictable from their lexical semantics. Specifically, we argue that some PC lexemes denote mass substances (in a technical sense), and therefore require possessive semantics to achieve the relevant truth conditions. A semantic theory for substance denoting lexemes is developed, and a compositional analysis of the relevant constructions is presented for Ulwa, an endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua. We argue that assuming semantic variation is necessary, since the observed generalizations cannot be captured by extending existing semantic analyses of gradable adjectives to all property concept lexemes.

Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2018

This paper considers the link between lexical category and lexical semantics, examining variation in the category of property concept (PC) words (Dixon, 1982; Thompson, 1989)-words introducing the descriptive content in translational equivalents of sentences whose main predicate is an adjective in languages with large open classes of them. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) conjecture that nominal PC words might only have mass-type denotation (conceived in the spirit of Link 1983), as diagnosed by possession in predication (e.g., Kim has beauty/#Kim is beauty). In Basaá, a class of PC nominals we call substance nouns trigger possession in predication, while a class we call adjectival nouns do not, thereby falsifying Francez and Koontz-Garboden's conjecture. We offer several diagnostics that confirm the substance denotation for the substance nouns, and an individual-characterizing denotation for the adjectival nouns, speculating on whether such nouns have a degree semantics, and whether they represent a crosslinguistically rare category or not.

APA Newsletter on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers, 2018

This paper in an elementary level expresses the inevitable relation between the word and meaning from the prominent Indian philosophical trends by giving stress on Vyakti-śakti-vāda and Jāti-śakti-vāda, the two contender doctrines. The first one puts emphasis on the semantic value of a predicate whereas the latter draws attention to the generic uses of nouns. The second part of the writing underpins Navya Nyāya and Kumārila’s positions on the word-meaning reliance and the debate initiate when we look back to the question whether the word-meaning relation sounds conventional or eternal. I propose a position (śabda-vivarta-vāda) on these issues derived from the works of Patan᷈jali and Bhartṛharị, two grammarians of classical Indian tradition. They defend eternal verbum as the material cause of the word and objects. This doctrine advocates uniforism by giving up bifurcation between the word and the world.

1996

2010

This is the term paper I wrote for the Field Methods course at Rice University back in 2010. Some information in it might be wrong or misguided given the limited time and knowledge I had to write it. But the transcribed text might be useful to those working on Dravidian languages. So it deserves to be archived here.

Noun modifiers can be classified into two types, pre modifiers and post modifiers based on the position of their occurrence with the head noun. Pre modifiers are those which come before nouns and post modifiers are those which come after nouns. Noun modifiers can be further classified into two types based on their constitution: phrasal modifiers and clausal modifiers. English makes use of all the above mentioned types of modifiers. Malayalam makes use of predominantly pre-modifiers only. The pre-modifiers in Malayalam can be further separated as in the case of English into phrasal and clausal modifiers. Both the modifiers give information about the nouns they modify. Malayalam makes use of adjectives, possessive forms, demonstratives, numerals (ordinals and cordinals), quantifiers and nominals as phrasal premodifiers (Asher and Kumari, 1997:123-131) and relative clauses as clausal modifiers. nalla ‘good’ and ceRiya ‘small’ are attributive adjectives and they modify nouns as premodifiers (eg. nalla kuTTi ‘good child’ and ceRiya viiTu ‘small house’). Malayalam does not have articles. It makes use of oru ‘one’ which can be considered as equivalent to article ‘a’ in English. It does not have article equivalent to ‘the’ in English. Sometimes not having an article oru ‘a’ gives the sense ‘the’ in Malayalam. Possessive forms of both nouns and pronouns function as noun modifiers. In the phrases pasuvinRe paal, pasuvin paal and pashum which all mean ‘cow’s milk’, Re is the possessive marker; pashum and pushuv-in are the oblique forms of pashu ‘cow’ which functions as modifiers of the noun paal ‘milk’. en-Re ‘my’ and avaL-uTe ‘her’ are possessive case inflected forms of the pronoun nouns njaan ‘I’ and avaL ‘she’ respectively and they functions as possessive pronouns and modify the following nouns (eg. en-Re viiTu ‘my house’ and avaL-uTe kuTTi ‘her child’). Demonstratives or demonstrative adjectives modify the following noun for proximity and remoteness. ii is used as proximate demonstrative (e.g. ii kuTTi 'this child') and aa is used as a remote demonstrative (e.g. aa kuTTi 'that child'. Cardinal and ordinal numerals and quantifiers too modify nouns (e.g. pattu kuTTikaL 'ten children', pattaamatta kuTTi 'tenth child', kuRe kuTTikaL 'few children'. In the case of noun phrases of the construction type N+N, the first noun can be seen mostly as a modifier (e.g. maTicci kuTTi 'lazy child', vaasana tailam 'scented oil'). Certain nouns inflected for locative case can function as modifiers of nouns (Asher and Kumari, 1997:128) (e.g. kaaTT-ile taTi 'forest wood', kuLatt-ile miinU 'pond fish'). Apart from these phrasal modifiers Malayalam makes use of relative clauses formed from sentences with verbs as clausal modifiers. For example ciinjnja is an adjective participial (ADJP) form of the verb ciiyuka ‘become bad’ and paThicca is an adjectival participial form of the verb paThikkuka ‘to study’. ciinja and paThicca respectively and they occur as premodifers to modify nouns (ciinjnja pazam ‘rotten fruit’, paTicca paiyan ‘educated boy’). Malayalam does not make use of a relative pronoun for the formation of relative clause or adjectival clause. Rather it makes use of an adjectival participle form of a verb which modifies a noun. We call the relative clauses or adjectival clauses as noun modifying expressions and the aim of this paper is to explicate in details about noun modifying expressions in Malayalam.