M.B.Emeneau: A Citation Indexing Study with Special Reference to India as a Linguistic Area: A Web Resource for Researchers

B.A.Sharada
Central Institute of Indian Langauges
Manasagangothri, Mysore 570006, INDIA
sharada@ciil.stpmy.soft.net

ABSTRACT

      The concept " India as a Linguistic area" drew the interest of many eminent scholars in linguistics and allied disciplines. They identified this contribution of M.B.Emeneau as a classic paper. This citation study explores the way researchers have used his contributions in their endeavors.

      A webpage on Emeneau's contribution is created at: http://www.ciil.org/virlib Online Bibliography of M.B. Emeneau with Citation Index where in one could check online and get the cited and citing documents just by a single click.

1. Introduction

      Murray B Emeneau (MBE) is a renowned scholar in Dravidian Linguistics, Sanskrit and General Linguistics. His areas of research are Comparative Dravidian, Areal Linguistics, Ethnography, etc. His publications include his extensive work on Sanskrit, Dravidian Linguistics, and India as a linguistic area, including the volumes such as Toda Songs, Toda Grammar and Texts, Kota Texts, Kolami: a Dravidian Language, A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary (with T Burrow), and, most recently, Sanskrit studies: Selected Papers (edited by B A van Nooten), and Language and Linguistic Area (essays: selected by Anwar S Dil). Linguists have referred to his paper " India as a linguistic area " as a classic paper. A statement by K.R.Norman is worthy of being recalled here. "Although the phrase 'linguistic area' is in common use among linguists, it is interesting to note that it was only invented in 1943 by H.V.Velton as a translation of the German term 'Sprachbund', and its use did not become widespread until Emeneau included it in the title of a paper in 1956. 1

2. Citation indexing

      Citation Indexing studies are done to find the influence and impact of an author. As such interpretation of the data is as important as the citation data are. The output will be an organized list of cited articles identified by a source citation. The coinage "Citation Index" was introduced by Eugene Garfield who started the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) that collects and analyses journals, articles and their citations and tests the impact of cited papers on citing papers. The idea behind citation index is that a research article makes an impact only if it is read and used by others for their research. It is thus an index of recognition too.

      Most of the studies in citation indexing are based on the readymade databases published by the ISI and available in the information market such as:

•  Science Citation Index/ Web of Science (SCI)

•  Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)

•  Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)

      Unlike the citation studies done based on these databases, the present study limits to a single author M.B.Emeneau and a single theme ' India as a linguistic area'. The present study analyses the data on two aspects:-

•  Contributions to the selected topic by MBE that forms the bibliography

•  Based on the bibliography, the citation indexing study.

The latter answers two main questions such as:

3. Data source

      The sample data on MBE's contribution was available in the sources mentioned below.

•  Few books 2 that contained MBE's bibliography as part of the books were searched for the main bibliography. Some publications were available on the internet 3 .

•  Since books have been recognized as the primary source of information for linguists, relevant books were checked for the references of MBE for the Citation file.

•  The best source s for doing the citation indexing for journals are ISI, SSCI and A&HCI databases, 4 but since the coverage of these database was from 1980 onwards MBE's works were not included in it. Hence the journals were checked for the references manually. Manual data collection of this type may not be that comprehensive. But since the work is being done online, it is flexible, and expands as and when the data is added.

      The data collection work of the articles on this particular topic had few constraints too. For example: Emeneau 1965.

      Diffusion and evaluation in comparative linguistics . In India and Historical Grammar. Annamalai University Publications in Linguistics No.5. 1965. p.1-24.

      This paper is based on a lecture given in the Romance Philology Lecture series at the University of California , Berkeley on November 3, 1955 with the title 'Dialectology and Comparative Linguistics'. When searched for the original title, this was not found in the bibliographies. So this title was included in the bibliography.

4. Methodology

       The bibliographic data was collected using index cards with a mention of relevant citations in the overleaf. The data collection was manual and then the same was digitized in order to get the output online. The main bibliography file consists of entire contribution of MBE using MS Access at the backend. At the front end, cited articles are displayed on the webpage after ASP coding.

      In the Table -1, in the first column, the id number preceded by the letter ' E' refers to the main bibliography file of MBE available in the site http://www.ciil.org/virtualing/emeneau Online Bibliography of M.B. Emeneau with Citation Index. This Id is used as the primary key for creating relation code to the cited documents. On the web page, a check box is provided for citing documents. A single click on the selected bibliographical item of MBE file and a click on 'Search' will display the entire citing documents of MBE.

5. Procedure

      Twenty five documents from MBE's bibliography are classified under the heading " India as a Linguistic Area". The complete bibliography is presented in Table -1 that includes the Id number, which is the primary key and Times cited, which gives the total number of citations to each item.

Abbreviations used here are:

      DLEF Dravidian Linguistics, Ethnology and Folktales: Collected Papers by M. B. Emeneau (1967)

DS Dravidian Studies: Selected Papers by M. B. Emeneau (1994)

IJDL International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics

ISTS The International Seminar on Tamil Studies. Kuala Lumpur .

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

Lg Language

LLA Language and Linguistic Area: Essays by M. B. Emeneau (1980)

PAPS Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

TC Tamil Culture

 Table -1 Cited documents

6. Analysis and discussion

      The analysis is done on both bibliography (cited) and citations (citing).

 6.1 Bibliography

Out of 25 documents, 8 are journal articles, 15 published in books and 2 are unpublished. They have been cited in many books, journal articles, book reviews, etc. Each of the titles of the cited document mentioned in Table 1 has been analyzed on the following areas:

•  Subject

•  Author

•  Source

•  Year

•  Reprint

•  Times cited

      As far as Subject is concerned, the bibliography may be classified into two areas wherein the distribution is equal:

a. Historical and Sociolinguistic study of Indian languages

b. Emergence of the sub-field Areal linguistics

      The author is by default M.B.Emeneau. Some linguists, such as Anwar S Dil and Andreé F. Sjoberg have edited the collection of his work connected to this study.

      Data type could be seen in books and journal articles. The distribution is - Cyclostyled (1), seminar papers(2), journal articles(10), books(12). Among the journal articles,' Language' and ' IJDL' top the list of journals in the present sample.

      The year refers to the publication year of the cited document. Decade wise MBE's contributions were counted. Following is the Year wise table. In this selected area of study MBE started his debut in 1954. Maximum contribution was in 1960s and continued in 1992 and 1997.

Table-2 Year wise distribution

      Reprint gives an idea how many times MBE's articles got reprinted. The following Table 3 Reprint of MBE's work in the selected topic is a mirror for his reprinted publications.

Table - 3 Reprint of MBE's works

      Out of twenty -five papers, 8 papers are reprinted. The year of publication is entered in bold. Out of this, seven papers are reprinted in " Language and linguistic area: Essays by Murray B Emeneau. Selected and introduced by Dil Anwar S". California : Stanford University Press.1980. This book has been reviewed also. One such review is by Norman K. R. in Lingua 56(1): p. 93-96.1982.

6.2 Citation indexing

       Citation indexing relates to the citing documents. Based on the field 'Times cited' in Table-1, the citing documents are further analyzed on the following lines.

•  Citing Authors

•  Subject wise distribution

•  Year wise distribution

•  Sources

6.2.1 Citing authors

      The rank list of citing authors mentioned in Table-4 brings to light the fact that who tops the list in citing MBE. The rank list is limited to minimum 4 citing papers.

Table - 4 Rank list of citing authors

      The citing record shows that times cited ranges from 1 to 42 and cited by one is 68, two is 27 and three times is by 9 authors. MBE himself tops the list followed by Bh.Krishnamurti. From the above Table it may be ascertained that MBE influenced the scholars well known in the field of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages, Sociolinguistics with special reference to contact and convergence, Area studies, Historical and comparative linguistics, etc.

•  Subject wise distribution

      Subject wise refers to the list of topics of different citing documents that have cited MBE's works. The titles of the citing documents were taken and word-count was done. In total there were 406 words. Further, classification of the titles helped in arriving to some conclusion. MBE's publications played an important role not only in shaping the field of areal study of Indian languages but areal linguistics in general. The results are mentioned below.

•  The term " linguistic area" are used in the following ways:

•  "Ethiopian- language- area"

•  Area

•  Area- features

•  Areal

•  Area-Linguistics

•  Linguistic-Area

•  Linguistics- area

•  Sociolinguistics-area

•  Sociolinguistic-area

•  With the language families such as Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Irano-Indian, Munda language and Tibeto-Burman, entries were found including for few languages like Bengali, Bhojpuri, Brahui, Celtic, Dakkhni, English , Hindi, Italic, Japanese, Kashmiri, Konkani, Kodagu, Kurukh, Ladakhi, Malto, Marathi, old- Tamil, old-Indo- Aryan, Oriya, Remo, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Sora and Tamil .

•  In Area studies, significant citations are found in papers connected with South Asia . Also works like 'Myth of Caucasian Sprachbund', 'Nehru and the Language Politics of India', 'Otherness of English' and studies connected to Indianization of English have referred to MBE's works.

•  The rank list of concepts appearing more than 5 times is mentioned in Table-5

Table - 5 Rank list of concepts from citing file

      The concepts such as Bilingualism,/Multilingualism, Communication, Communities, Comparative, Convergence, Creolization, Culture, Education, Ethno-Linguistic, Historical-linguistics, History, Indian-history, Kinship, Language-shift, Loan-words, Modernization, Multiglossic, Negro African, Nilgiris, Non-Native , North West Coast Sprachbund, Numerals, Onomatopoetic, Pan-dialectal, Phonological, Plurality , Policies, Pre history, Reflexivization, Retroflex, Sentences, Society, Socio-Political, Sounds, Spoken, Structural, Surface, Syntax, System, Technical terminology, Textual, Theoretical, Theory, Transformational, Transitive , Tribal, Types, Universals, Variation, Variables, Vowel, [Listed alphabetically] etc., appear too, stating that the citing documents have referred to Emeneau for working on these topics in addition to the concepts mentioned in Table-5. Further classification of these documents support that Historical and Comparative linguistics (105 entries), Sociolinguistics (90), Areal Linguistics (43), Grammar (55), Phonology (22),etc being MBE's specialized fields of research, have made their impact in the present limited field also.

 6.2.3 The year wise distribution

       The year in this section refers to the publication date of the citing document. The citing year starts from 1955 with only one entry to it. Maximum is in the decade 1990s. The following Table 6 gives a picture of citing articles that have referred to MBE's papers mentioned in Table 1.

Table - 6 Decade wise distribution of citing articles

      The ranking for each decade depicts that MBE's major contribution on " India as Linguistic area" during the decades 1950s and 1960s have been cited in 1990s. Comparatively even 1980s also are not less. Though the decade has started in 2000, within four years 57 articles have referred to MBE.

6.2.4 Sources

      Sources refer to the book, journal or conference proceedings wherein the citing article is published. In total 189 citing articles are from books in which Indian publications are 81. Fifteen papers are from conference proceedings and 133 papers are from journals.

 6.2.4.1 Citing journals

       In Table-7 the rank list of citing journals are mentioned. Out of 133 papers, 90 articles are present in journals published in India alone.

Table-7 List of citing journals

Three times citing journals are:

•  Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute,

•  Journal of the institute of Asian Studies

•  Mozhiyiyal

•  Pakha Sanjam

•  South Asian Language Review

•  The yearbook of South Asian languages and Linguistics

Two times is the journal "Linguistics of the Tibeto - Burmen area " Only once citing journals are:

•  Indo Iranian Journal,

•  International Journal of the Sociology language,

•  Journal of the Asiatic Society,

•  Quotatives revisited,

•  The Malaysian Society of Asian Studies

•  Studies in the linguistic sciences

7. Emeneau Webpage

       In the MBE webpage, a check box is provided in the main file. A tick mark in the check box shall give the entire list of citing items to that particular cited item.

For example the cited document " India as a Linguistic Area" Emeneau (1956) has been cited 117 times.

      The analysis of the citing articles of this particular title is mentioned below:

•  Citing authors - 77.

•  Among the publication type:

Books - 64 [Indian publications are 30]

Journals - 49 [IJDL -13; Anthropological Linguistics- 8.etc]

•  Meetings - 4.

•  The chronological breakup decade wise is as follows.

•  1960-69 -19 times

•  1970-79 - 20 times

•  1980-89 - 27 times

•  1990-99 - 39 times

•  2000- 04- 13 times

      Though this paper was published in 1956 in the journal 'Language', the first citation was in 1962, which is six years later of the publication date and later got cited in 1964 and 1967. From 1968 on gradually increased with slight break in 1974, 1991 and 1999.

8. Inference

      The rank list of Cited authors says something about which kind of linguists MBE influenced such as Dravidianists (Eg:Bh.Krishnamutrhy), Sociolinguists (Eg:M.C.Shapiro), Arealist (C.P.Masica), Sanskritist (Eg:Hans Henrik Hock), etc.

1. Though the theme of the present study is " India as a linguistic area " MBE's impact could be assessed in two respects:

•  Historical and Sociolinguistic study of Indian languages

•  Emergence of the sub-field Areal linguistics.

2. MBE's impact is identified in the areal linguistics papers who have published outside Indian languages in a very few papers such as Sumerian, Negro African, Pakisthan,etc. "Is there an Ethiopian Language Area?" is also one such example.

3. Among the Citing journals, though Indian journals tops the rank list, equal share of both foreign and Indian journals is seen in the ratio 12:11when we take the total number of journals concluding that the publication of articles are not limited to only Indian journals.

4. The year wise breakup of citing file reveals the dependence of researchers on MBE's work even in the present decade also. From this we can infer that just as scientific theories are based on axioms propounded centuries ago, MBE's classic contribution " India as Linguistic area" is referred even today in linguistics research.

5. Manual Citation indexing study is a tedious process. The citations collected from books have to be done manually without which the work process will remain incomplete. The study is made available on the web. Inclusion of any missed out items will not be difficult. Any researcher who finds that the citation is missing may help in updating the present venture.

REFERENCES

•  Norman ,K.R.1982. Review of Language and Linguistic Area. Selected

introduced by Anwar, S. Dil.1980 . Stanford: Stanford University Press,

California .

•  Dravidian Studies : Selected Papers/M.B. Emeneau. Delhi , Motilal Banarsidass, 1994 .

2a. Language and Linguistic Area. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

California . Selected introduced by Anwar, S. Dil.1980

2b. The Dravidian languages/Bhadriraju Krishnamuti. Cambridge : Cambridge

University Press.2003.

2c. Thirty Second All India conference of Dravidian linguistics. June 10-12,

2004.

3. http://www.southasiabibliography.de/

3 a . http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/projects/androbib.htm

4. Citation Indexing: Its importance to Indian Linguistics/B.A.Sharada. Language

in India ,1:1 March 2001 http://www.languageinindia.com

5. Dimensions of sociolinguistics in South Asia . papers in memory of Gerald

Kelley. Edited by Edward C Dimock, Jr. Braj B Kachru and Bh. Krishnamurti. New Delhi , Oxford and IBM. 1992.