Wordhood and lexicality: Noun incorporation in Hindi

This article provides a survey of the developments that have taken place in the description of Indian English (IndE) in the past two centuries, with particular attention to the phenomena of language (e.g. phonology, lexicogrammar, and pragmatics) that have been examined from a descriptive perspective. The evolution of English in India through centuries of use, first during the colonial period and then as the “associate official language” of independent India, stimulated the development of descriptions of all aspects of the language. The critical review in this article, however, demonstrates that the linguistic descriptions except those in relation to society are scant and the often-made intuitive observation that IndE is extensively studied does not apply to the description of linguistic phenomena. While providing lists of features based on impressionistic or small-scale data dominated the later part of the 20th century, the focus of current research has shifted to corpus-based and quantitative investigations. This article explores the systems of IndE that have been studied in descriptive research, shows that the attitude towards linguistic descriptions is linked to the growth and use of English over time, and aims to stimulate further research by posing key questions that need to be answered.

Indian Journal of Language and Linguistics

This research paper presents a detailed analysis of the noun phrases (NP) in War-Khasi and War-Jaiñtia, two varieties of the Khasi language spoken in north-eastern India. The study investigates the syntactic and morphological features of NPs, with a particular emphasis on the distinctions between pre-modifiers and post- modifiers. By comparing and contrasting the NPs of War-Khasi and War-Jaiñtia, the paper highlights the unique attributes and functions of these constructions in each variety. The research also explores the various constructions of NPs in both varieties and evaluates their syntactic and semantic roles. The findings demonstrate that while both varieties share similar NP constructions, there are notable differences in the functions and attributes of NPs in each variety. Furthermore, the paper elaborates on the different functions of NPs and their lexical elements, including the head noun and all of its accompanying modifiers. Overall, this study contributes to our under...

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.

The full citation for this is: Morey, Stephen. 2013 ‘The marking of noun phrases: Some observations on the languages of North East India’ In G. Hyslop, S. Morey and M. Post (eds) North East Indian Linguistics, Volume 5. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, India. 169-191

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2003

In this volume, we report new scholarship on fourteen South Asian languages, from four different language families, in a specific domain: the grammar of anaphora. This work was carried out and is represented here in terms of a unified framework that was designed to achieve cross-linguistic comparability. It was informed by one guiding principle: the convergence of two lines of investigation that are often kept distinct in linguistic inquiry today: linguistic theory, in a generative grammar framework, and linguistic typology. The former is focused on searching for explanations of the principles and parameters that underlie the cognitive competence for natural language and that are hypothesized to provide a "Universal Grammar" (UG), or underlying architecture, for all natural languages and for their learnability. The second line of investigation attempts to capture the "true facts" of cross-linguistic variation in the universal array of existent natural languages (cf. Comrie 1981). In our view, fruitful development of the science of linguistics depends on this integration (see, e.g., Subbarao-Saxena 1987a, 1987b; Subbarao 1998). That is, it requires a lively interchange between theory construction and the empirical challenge presented to it by the detailed investigation, in a principled manner, of the phenomena found in a wide variety of actual human languages. Without basic theory, the fundamental questions of the nature of the human competence for language cannot be addressed. However, in the absence of real language data, proposed answers may not be relevant to the real questions. The South Asian area is a particularly rich domain for this specific area of linguistic inquiry, as well as others. It includes several major families, of which four are represented by languages in this volume. In some cases, members of a single family are widely separated and in contact with members of others, resulting in various degrees of convergence. The existence of a South Asian linguistic area has been recognized for some time, beginning particularly with the pioneering work of Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926, 1953), Jules Bloch (1934), and Murray Emeneau (1956), and work in that domain has been continued by other scholars (see, for example, Masica 1976, 1991 and the general account in Shapiro-Schiffman 1981). At the same time, there are significant differences and subareas, as the works in this volume clearly attest. South Asia thus represents a natural laboratory for the investigation of phenomena such as those

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2018

Lingua, 1974

2018

Compounding and suffixation are important processes of word-formation in Malayalam. Compound words are formed mostly from two or more noun stems, from a noun and a verb stem, or, in a relatively small number of cases, from other combinations. The most common type of compound word is one in which both or all constituent parts are noun stems. This type of compounding is productive. Formation of a reduplicated noun compound by the combination of a noun root and a partially reduplicated form of the same root is also productive. Compound verbs are formed mostly from a noun + verb combination. This is a productive process. In addition to it, compound verbs are formed extensively by the combination of the verbal participle form of one verb with another verb. This process cannot be considered as a productive one. Prefixation is an entirely unproductive process, though there are some pairs of words borrowed from Sanskrit which differ only in the presence of a negative-marking prefix on one member of the pair. Verbs form many abstract nouns by suffixation. A proper understanding of the word-formation in a language needs classification of such processes on formal grounds. Bauer (1983) classifies the word-formation in English as follows: Compounding, Prefixation, Suffixation, Conversion, Backformation, Clipping, Formation of blends, Formation of acronyms and Word manufacturing. Malayalam makes use of compounding and suffixation extensively for the formation of words. Though the present paper attempts to give the types of word formation in Malayalam based on typology, explanations will be given by raising certain problematic issues.

European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 2012