Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (E-Journal)
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Morphological Focus Marking in Standard Colloquial Assamese
Full text linkThe current paper investigates how morphologically marked focus is prosodically realised in Standard Colloquial Assamese (SCA), the standard variety of Assamese. It apart from demonstrating the distribution of morphological focus markers (MFMs) in SCA, highlights their relationship with their host, and their intonational behaviour. Further, the MFM marked focus has been compared with the contrastive focus (CF) realisation. We propose in this study that MFM induced focus is phonologically different from CF realisation.
Perspectival reflexivity (or what makes reflexives special): a case study from Tamil
Full text linkoai:ojs.katze.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de:article/80
Reevaluating Standard Analyses of Comparison: The View from Malayalam
Full text linkIn this paper, I will argue for an alternative analysis where both the standard marker than and the comparative marker more encode comparative semantics. The evidence for this comes from Malayalam comparatives. Malayalam lacks an adjectival category and uses complex property concept expressions to encode adjectival meaning (Menon 2013, Menon and Pancheva forthcoming). In the absence of adjectives, nominal and verbal comparatives are formed using two different kinds of comparatives. The comparative marker is an adnomial degree modifier along the lines of ‘in addition to’, ‘in excess of’. The comparative semantics is encoded in the semantically non-vacuous than which functions as a quantifier domain adverbial (similar in spirit to Schwarzschild 2014) whereby it restricts the domain of the degree quantifier more.
Scopal Effects of Reduplication
Full text linkThis paper is based on the observation that while reduplication of inflected morphemes in South Asian Languages (henceforth SALs), usually copies the base only, certain contexts, both in verbal and nominal morphemes cause obligatory copying of the inflection. In the light of relevant literature, the paper explores the semantic and phonological structure of these constructions, and the manner in which these differ from other reduplicated structures in SALs.
A Movement Approach for Multi-Head Correlatives
Full text linkThe goal of this paper is to provide a semantic analysis of multi-head correlatives in Hindi/Urdu that takes their peculiar behavior regarding NPI licensing and islands into account. This is done by assuming movement, which has the benefit of being a recursive process that can be used for an arbitrary amount of heads without resorting to type shifting or additional rules of composition.
The Perfect Nominative
Full text linkWestern Indo-Aryan languages are widely known to host ergative subjects in the perfective. However, there is very little discussion on the optional inclusion of nominative subjects with perfect unergatives. This paper highlights such variation data from two WIALs Punjabi and Gujarati, along with the structural similarities and differences between their transitives and unergatives. It proposes that the optional nominative in the perfective is indicative of a full-phi T head selection, necessitated by case-competition between the two arguments of the unergative at the edge of vP.