Journal of South Asian Linguistics 2008

Im November ist eine neue Online-Zeitschrift mit sprachwissenschaftlicher Ausrichtung erschienen:
Journal of South Asian Linguistics / editors: Rajesh Bhatt ; Miriam Butt. 2008-
Keine ISSN
URL: http://katze.sprachwiss.uni-konstanz.de/~jsal/ojs/index.php/jsal/index
Dateiformat: PDF

Selbstbeschreibung

The On-Line Journal of South Asian Linguistics is devoted to work pursuing formal approaches to the study of South Asian Languages. We conceive of South Asian Languages broadly to cover the languages of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet and that of the South Asian diasporas.
   The journal will cover the areas of computational linguistics, historical linguistics, language acquisition, morphology, phonology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, semantics, and syntax as well as work on other areas of linguistics that interfaces with one of the aforementioned areas. The formal analyses pursued in the articles can be couched in any theoretical framework. An important goal of the journal is to bring together theoretically oriented work with the vast range of crosslinguistic variation found in the South Asian subcontinent and to provide a dedicated forum for a discussion of the linguistic diversity of this area with a focus on the understudied and underdocumented languages of the region.

Inhalt: Vol. 1, No. 1 (2008)
Rajesh Bhatt, Miriam Butt: Editorial Statement.
1. Dahl, Eystein: Performative Sentences and the Morphosyntax-Semantics Interface in Vedic

Abstract: Performative sentences represent a particularly intriguing type of self-referring assertive clauses, as they constitute an area of linguistics where the relationship between the semantic-grammatical and the pragmatic-contextual dimension of language is especially transparent. This paper examines how the notion of performativity interacts with different tense, aspect and mood categories in Vedic. The claim is that one may distinguish three slightly different constraints on performative sentences, a modal constraint demanding that the proposition is represented as being in full accordance with the Common Ground, an aspectual constraint demanding that there is a coextension relation between event time and reference time and a temporal constraint demanding that the reference time is coextensive with speech time. It is shown that the Archaic Vedic present indicative, aorist indicative and aorist injunctive are quite compatible with these constraints, that the basic modal specifications of present and aorist subjunctive and optative violate the modal constraint on performative sentences, but give rise to speaker-oriented readings which in turn are compatible with that constraint. However, the imperfect, the present injunctive, the perfect indicative and the various modal categories of the perfect stem are argued to be incompatible with the constraints on performative sentences.

2. Davison, Alice: A Case Restriction on Control: Implications for Movement

Abstract: The proper analysis of control has been an active topic of research. Recent proposals by Hornstein (1999, 2001) and Boeckx and Hornstein (2004) advocate treating control as involving raising into theta-positions, eliminating the need for a special control module. This paper introduces a restriction which distinguishes control environments from raising environments: the covert subject in a control construction in Hindi-Urdu cannot have dative case while the covert subject in a raising construction may. This Case Restriction is shown to hold in a wide variety of unrelated languages, but is not universal. In particular, languages with both forward and backward control systematically lack the Case Restriction. Various theories of control are examined with respect to how well they can represent the Case Restriction. The paper concludes that there is no non-stipulatory way to represent the Case Restriction in Hindi-Urdu if control and raising are treated alike.

3. Umesh Patil, Gerrit Kentner, Anja Gollrad, Frank Kügler, Caroline Fery, Shravan Vasisth: Focus, Word Order and Intonation in Hindi

Abstract: A production study is presented that investigates the effects of word order and information structural context on the prosodic realization of declarative sentences in Hindi. Previous work on Hindi intonation has shown that: (i) non-final content words bear rising pitch accents (Moore 1965, Dyrud 2001, Nair 1999); (ii) focused constituents show greater pitch excursion and longer duration and that post-focal material undergoes pitch range reduction (Moore 1965, Harnsberger 1994, Harnsberger and Judge 1996); and (iii) focused constituents may be followed by a phrase break (Moore 1965). By means of a controlled experiment, we investigated the effect of focus in relation to word order variation using 1200 utterances produced by 20 speakers. Fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of constituents were measured in Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences in different information structural conditions (wide focus, subject focus and object focus). The analyses indicate that (i) regardless of word order and focus, the constituents are in a strict downstep relationship; (ii) focus is mainly characterized by post-focal pitch range reduction rather than pitch raising of the element in focus; (iii) given expressions that occur pre-focally appear to undergo no reduction; (iv) pitch excursion and duration of the constituents is higher in OSV compared to SOV sentences. A phonological analysis suggests that focus affects pitch scaling and that word order influences prosodic phrasing of the constituents.