Kurukh Syntax With Special Reference To The Verbal System

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

This volume gathers the harvest of recent doctoral dissertations on South Asia, principally from North America and Western Europe, but exclusive of theses from universities in South Asia itself. The yield—1305 dissertations based on research carried out during the early and middle nineteen-sixties and brought to completion between 1966 and 1970—is even greater than one would have guessed, eloquent testimony to the expansion of South Asian studies in the West over the last decade. Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia seeks to be a comprehensive compilation of recently completed theses dealing in whole or in part with the former civilizations and the contemporary affairs of Ceylon, India, Nepal and Pakistan. At the same time, this work provides striking testimony of the dynamic growth of Asian Studies outside the subcontinent and particularly in the United States, Great Britain, Germany and France, where most of the major centers of scholarship are presently found. It is an interdisciplinary work covering the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences.

The present volume is the outcome of a seminar on the Ideology and Status of Sanskrit held in Leiden under the auspices of the International Institute for Asian Studies. The book contains studies of crucial periods and important areas in the history of the Sanskrit language, from the earliest, Vedic and pre-Vedic periods, through the period in which the (restricted) use of Sanskrit spread over practically all of South (including part of Central) and Southeast Asia (sometimes referred to as the period of "Greater India"), up to the recent history of Sanskrit in India. The contributions of this volume are divided into three sections: (1) Origins and Creation of the "Eternal Language"; (2) Transculturation, Vernacularization, Sanskritization; (3) The Sanskrit Tradition: Continuity from the past or Construction from the present?

Analysis to Synthesis introduces the process of Compound Verb Contraction to analyze the genesis of synthetic verb forms in the Dravidian languages. Contraction provides an explanation for their development from analytic forms by creating a paradigm of historical evolution that utilizes the formal and functional attributes of both the earlier and later forms. Triggered by a variety of different factors, Contraction guides the evolution of complex verb forms by using markedness relations to correlate their morphological, syntactic, and lexical dimensions. An original work in comparative Dravidian linguistics, Analysis to Synthesis provides etymologies for fifteen conjugations which have hitherto resisted explanation. All fifteen show the same general development, allowing us to extract a common historical pattern and clarify the reconstruction of Proto-Dravidian typology. Thanks to Contraction, the verb morphology and syntax of the protolanguage, as well as its lexical structure, are shown to exhibit a relatively analytic structure. Because it correlates general dimensions of linguistic structure, Contraction may readily be applied to languages beyond the Dravidian family. Detailed and closely argued, this study provides a model for the analysis of similar forms in other languages and language families.