Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (E-Journal)
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Number morphology on honorific nouns
Full text linkSingular honorific nouns in Hindi, Punjabi and Marathi show interesting behavior with respect to number morphology. While they uniformly trigger plural agreement, we find that certain plural affixes occur on these nouns, but others do not. I propose a morphosyntactic analysis for this asymmetry. I argue that the two types of plural affixes realize different syntactic heads: the plural affixes that occur on singular honorific nouns realize n, while the others realize Num. Building on Bhatt & Davis (2021) and using a mechanism for feature copying within the nominal phrase, I propose a structure for singular honorific nouns that can capture this generalization
Specification of the underspecified: A pragmatic analysis of the injunctive in the Rgveda
Full text linkThis paper uses formal pragmatics to show that discourse context alone is inadequate to explain the function of “injunctive” verb forms (i.e., finite verbs unspecified for tense or mood) in Rgvedic Sanskrit. Prior treatments, which explain the temporal and modal specification of the injunctive as being picked up from other verb forms in the immediate discourse, do not fully account for the injunctive’s observed meanings. By applying a framework known in neo-Gricean pragmatics as a “Horn strategy” to tense and modality, I explain the various functions of the injunctive as arising from partial blocking relationships that hold between it and other verb forms with which it competes
Gender and allocutivity
Full text linkThe term ‘allocutivity’ refers to the grammatical encoding of speech act participants, i.e. speaker and addressee of an utterance, which may also describe the social relations that they share with each other like politeness and familiarity. This paper explores allocutivity and its interaction with gender marking by identifying three types of allocutive languages: plain allocutive languages, addressee allocutive languages, and speaker allocutive languages. In order to account for the presence and absence of gender marking as part of the allocutive expression, we propose an analysis that assumes speaker and addressee to instantiate implicit syntactic arguments (Speas & Tenny, 2003), which trigger gender marking if they are in the vicinity of a gender probe, situated on the speech act head. Locality is achieved via external Merge of the speaker argument and internal Merge of the hearer argument. The latter we derive from drawing parallels to object shift phenomena
What umlaut tells us about the underlying morphological structure of verbs in Sinhala
Full text linkIn this short paper, we investigate the morphophonological process of umlaut in Sinhala with a focus on verbal umlaut. The focus lies on an accurate description of the patterns of application and underapplication of the process in question. In other words: When does umlaut apply and when doesn’t it apply? As has been noted in the literature, umlaut itself seems to be triggered by an arbitrary morphological diacritic on specific affixes. What has gone unnoticed so far is the fact that the umlaut-triggers themselves fall into two classes: Strong umlaut-triggers and weak umlaut-triggers. We provide two diagnostics to distinguish these classes and then go on to argue that these two asymmetries are, on an abstract level, due to the same configuration, namely that weak triggers cannot trigger umlaut across a morpheme boundary while strong triggers can. In the final section, we then show that this generalization provides a strong argument for (i) the underlyingly concatenative nature of the verbal morphology of Sinhala and (ii) the necessity to refer to the notion of the morpheme
Acoustic phonetic properties of p-words and g-words in Sora
Full text linkThis paper presents the first analysis of the intonational properties of polysyllabic verbal forms in Sora, a mildly polysynthetic language belonging to the Munda language family of India. The data indicate the previous claims on Sora cannot be maintained, and the language in no sense reflects a Quantity Sensitive trochaic pattern of prominence assignment
Number, Honor, and Agreement in Hindi-Urdu
Full text linkIn Hindi-Urdu, the honorific marker ji: can be added to a third person nominal to signal honorification of the nominal referent. The use of ji: triggers plural agreement, despite the nominal itself being singular. We propose that the formative that carries the semantics of plurality (*) and the formative that carries the semantics of honorification (Hon) occupy the same syntactic position, which we identify as Num. These two formatives have the same formal features, which correspond to the features responsible for what is called plural agreement, and make the same selectional demand of their complement, namely that it appear in the oblique form. However the formatives have distinct realizations and distinct semantics. Both can have zero realization or overt realization; for honorification the overt realization can be at least -ji:, sa:b, mahoday, sir, ma’am, and for pluralization -˜a:, -˜o. The two formatives are in complementary distribution; Hon blocks and vice-versa; this means that the complement of Hon has no choice but to stay singular. We end by describingthe honorific distinctions shown with second-person pronouns, describing additional complexities that their analysis requires
The influence of orthography on spoken word recognition in Bangla
Full text linkThe lexical representation of words constitutes the phonological, orthographic and semantic information about a word, which is accessed together despite the task demanding only one aspect of the information. The role of orthography in word recognition tasks has been validated, though its influence on phonological tasks is lesser known. Recent studies in psycholinguistics have begun to investigate the possible influences of orthography on the auditory processing of words. The present paper reviews studies that have looked at orthographic influence on phonological tasks, and reports findings from a Rhyme-monitoring task in Bangla, to examine the role of orthography in auditory processing
Composing with gerunds and QC clauses: A case of factivity alternation in Bangla
Full text linkThis paper deals with a Bangla attitude verb, viz. bhab- ‘think’ which displays both factive and non-factive readings on the basis of the type of the items it combines with. It turns out to be factive with a gerundial DP, while it is not factive with QC clauses. This is a clear case of factivity alternation. I argue that this kind of alternation is caused mainly due to different compositional routes which this concerned attitude verb selects while composing with these two types of items. In case of the QC clauses, the composition happens by modifying the eventuality argument of the verb, which does not cause any sort of factive interpretation. Instead, the compositional route is of argumenthood which along with the pre-existence presupposition (Bondarenko 2020a) associated with the internal argument of this verb leads us to having factive inferences with gerundial complements
Exhaustive movement, exhaustive tone: A syntactic-prosodic investigation of Gujarati
Full text linkBased on data collected from speakers of Gujarati, we investigate whether exhaustivity and narrow focus have same eect on the syntactic position of an object and on sentence prosody. The pre-verbal position, which is immediately above the vP in Gujarati has been associated with narrow focus (Joshi 2020), and here we also investigate whether that position also conveys exhaustivity (Kiss 2010). To probe how syntactic position and prosody influence and are influenced by interpretations of exhaustivity and narrow focus on an argument, we conducted production and listening tasks on 10 native speakers of Gujarati. Novel experimental data from the production task suggests that Gujarati speakers are primarily concerned in ensuring that the argument is conveyed as a narrow-focused argument vis-a-vis an exhaustively focused one, irrespective of syntactic position, whereas results from the listening task suggest that once prosody was controlled, participants were able to consider syntactic variation as a marker of exhaustivity and not just of narrow focus