A collection of papers on word order variation in the languages of South Asia.

The South Asian languages, mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure, serial verb constructions, cleft- and question formation, to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be, issues of binding theory and raising, and issues of complementation, the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan, one of present-day India s most influential linguists.

One of the most hotly debated phenomena in natural language is that of leftward argument scrambling. This book investigates the properties of Hindi-Urdu scrambling to show that it must be analyzed as uniformly a focality-driven XP-adjunction operation. It proposes a novel theory of binding and coreference that not only derives the coreference effects in scrambled constructions, but has important consequences for the proper formulation of binding, crossover, reconstruction, and representational economy in the minimalist program. The book will be of interest not only to specialists in Hindi-Urdu syntax and/or scrambling, but to all students of generative syntax.

This volume offers theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the issues pertaining to ergativity, a grammatical patterning whereby direct objects are in some way treated like intransitive subjects, to the exclusion of transitive subjects. This pattern differs markedly from nominative/accusative marking whereby transitive and intransitive subjects are treated as one grammatical class, to the exclusion of direct objects. While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, research on the phenomenon has shown that languages do not fall clearly into one category or the other and that ergative characteristics are not consistent across languages. Chapters in this volume look at approaches to ergativity within generative, typological, and functional paradigms, as well as approaches to the core morphosyntactic building blocks of an ergative construction; related constructions such as the anti-passive; related properties such as split ergativity and word order; and extensions and permutations of ergativity, including nominalizations and voice systems. The volume also includes results from experimental investigations of ergativity, a relatively new area of research. A wide variety of languages are represented, both in the theoretical chapters and in the 16 case studies that are more descriptive in nature, attesting to both the pervasiveness and diversity of ergative patterns.

Information structure and the organization of oral texts have been rarely studied crosslinguistically. This book contains studies of the grammatical organization of information in languages from different areas (e.g. Amazonian, Finno-Ugric, South-Asian) from a variety of theoretical angles. It will be a valuable resource for researchers investigating the interaction of morphosyntax and discourse in familiar and less familiar languages.

Marit Julien investigates the relation between morphology and syntax, or more specifically, the relation between the form of inflected verbs and the position of those verbs. She surveys 530 languages and shows that, with the exception of agreement markers, the positioning of verbal inflectional markers relative to verb stems is compatible with a syntactic approach to morphology.

This book contains 48 papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, held by Ankara University in August 6-8, 2008. The contributions to this conference cover a wide range of topics in theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics relating to Turkish and Turkic languages in discussing a great variety of issues related to phonology and phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics, pragmatics and discourse, language acquisition, language contact, and applied linguistics, as they have been grouped in this volume. Although the main focus of the volume is on Turkish linguistic issues, there are also a number of articles in different modern linguistic frameworks dealing with Turkic languages and Turkish dialects. The book will be appealing to anyone interested in current issues in theoretical linguistics as well as those who are working on Turcology, linguistic typology, contact linguistics, and applied linguistics.

Bangla (Bengali), an Eastern Indo-Aryan Language, is the national language of Bangladesh with 150 million speakers and the state language of Paschim Banga (West Bengal) in India with 90 million speakers. There are sizeable communities of Bengalis scattered all over the world. Altogether, the number of native speakers make Bangla the fifth or sixth largest language in the world. Like Hindi and other South Asian languages, Bangla has subject-object-verb word order, postpositions, causative and compound verbs. Unlike Hindi it has no gender. This volume presents a systematic overview of the language, from the sound system to parts of speech, syntactic categories to reduplicative features and some short text passages. The book is written in transliteration throughout to provide ease and convenience to non-Bengali as well as to Bengali linguists and students. In order to connect linguistic analysis with the living language, the book is furnished with plenty of real language examples, demonstrating the spirit, grace and wit of the Bangla language.

This book studies the nouns at their syntactic level and compares their internal structure with that of the verbs. The major part of the book is drawn from my doctoral work on the structure of the Hindi nouns within the theoretical approach of determiner phrase analysis in the generative linguistics framework. The book investigates the structure of the nominal phrase in Hindi under the theoretical assumptions that nouns and verbs parallel in their internal structure. That is, nouns and verbs and for that matter other words, that either associate with the nouns or the verbs, are identical inside, in their internal world. This assumption has been called determiner phrase analysis of the nominal elements in the existing literature (Abney 1987). I draw upon evidence from the different phenomena of the nominal phrases, such as the genitive constructions, (in)definiteness, focus and topic inside them, displacement phenomenon within the noun and the gerund constructions. The study is reported in three chapters.

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.