INDIC
ARTICLES 2000 - AN ANALYSIS
B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
LANGUAGE
IN INDIA Volume 3 : 1 January 2003
1. Introduction
The concept Indexing
has opened new avenues to project the metadata in any manner the research
demands. Here is one such way that presents the contribution published in
journals and anthologies during the year 2000 January to December. The articles
reflect the study on Indian languages and linguistics.
1.1. Approach to the Study
This research obtained the
details of 247 articles for analysis. The data was collected from the journals
published in India, Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts,
Vol 34, EBSCO database, and Economic and Political Weekly.
The study limited, regrettably, its focus on the articles published in English
and on Indic languages. The following search strategies were adopted: all
Indian languages mentioned individually, names of contributors of Indian
origin, topics in subject search, etc., were collected. In the EBSCO database
for online search, the Academic Search premier and ERIC database were selected.
Also search for related words and search within the full text of the articles
were done limiting the result to one year, namely, January to December 2000.
The list of articles was displayed with their link files. Some articles had
Abstracts prepared by the author, and few had full text. The Search terms were
in hypertext in all the fields. The selected articles were fed into MS Access
for further analyses and retrieval. An alphabetical list of contributions is
presented in Annexure 1. This study presents the patterns and the content of
the data collected.
1.2. Study of Pattern
1.2.1 Authorship Pattern
The authorship pattern can be
studied in two ways. They are,
- Multiple authorship pattern
- Author productivity
1.2.2. Multiple Authorship
Pattern
The multiple authorship pattern
or research coordination in Linguistics is not sharply defined. It has already
been inferred that, in linguistics, research is mostly individualistic rather
than team- oriented. It is seen only in interdisciplinary topics,
experiment-oriented studies, and Multi-language-oriented researches (Sharada
1991). The present study also supports the finding of my earlier study of
single author contribution versus research co-ordination. From the above sample,
in total only 35 papers were multiple-authored. Two authors have jointly
contributed for 26 articles; three authors for 7, and 2 articles are by more
than four authors. The statement made by Rogge (1976) "Anthropologists
either by nature or by tradition, tend to be loaners and at least 50 to 60
years behind chemists in the trend toward multiauthorship" is true also
for the linguists. He suggests that a restructuring of the academic reward
system may be one method of encouraging collaboration among anthropologists.
This holds good for linguists also, especially in the Indian situation.
1.2.3. Author Productivity
Table 1 given below depicts the
Rank list of authors contributing more than one paper. Author productivity is
one of the measures to distinguish eminent scholars in a field.
Out of the total sample, 20
authors have contributed more than one paper. Maximum contribution is by Wali,
and Manjali (5 each). D. N. S. Bhat continues to be one among the prolific
authors(Sharada 1987 & 1989). Two articles are by 11 authors. The critical
issue here is that the time span considered for the present study is only one
year. So most of the authors have contributed one article each except the
authors mentioned in this Table.
1.2.4. Geographical
Distribution of Authors
The affiliation of authors was
available for only 158 articles. For the rest, affiliation could not be traced.
The contributions are from the following states in India:
More than 37 percent of the
articles were contributed from India, and the rest from abroad. About twenty
percent of the contribution within India was mainly among the four States, New
Delhi ranking first with 15 articles. Among the contributions from abroad, 16
articles were from USA and 40 articles were from 19 different countries such as
Canada, USSR, Spain, Germany, etc.
Further, the data was analyzed
considering the Universities and Institutions in India and abroad . In total,
118 contributions were from the universities out of which 52 papers were from
India and the rest from abroad. Jawaharlal University topped the list. In
total, 40 Institutions contributed, and out of this list 35 articles were from
India and the rest from abroad. So, the scholars working on Indic languages
from abroad have contributed more research articles than those staying in
India. Also contribution from the institutions run or established by the
Government of India working in the language and linguistics domain is
negligible. This is in contrast to my earlier finding that revealed that the
contributions from such institutes topped the list (Sharada 1990). The scholars
of these institutions need to make a review of their involvements, research
pursuits, and methods of publishing or publicizing their accomplishments.
1.3. Journal Preference
Indian journals have published
182 articles and the remaining 65 were published in foreign journals. Out of
this, 115 Indian authors preferred publishing their contribution in Indian
Journals only. The contributions from other countries included those of forty
Indians residing abroad and they have opted for the foreign journals for their
publication. Out of the total contributions, 186 were Articles, 48 were Book
Reviews, 1 Book Notice, 9 Notes and Discussion, and 3 Review articles. Though
Indian journals are very limited in number, linguists from India prefer Indian
journals only to get their articles published. This trend noted by my earlier
research still continues (Sharada 1990).
1.4. Subject Dispersion
Mentioned below is the list of
topics within Linguistics that the scholars have chosen to write their papers
on.
The findings on the subject
dispersion in my earlier study reflected the preference of Indian scholars more
towards the well-developed topics than towards the newly developing ones as
their preferred fields of research (Sharada 1990). The present study also
supports the earlier findings with a minor difference relating to the
preference ranking of the topics: 20% contribution for Syntax, 19% for
Sociolinguistics, followed by 10% Applied Linguistics and 9% Semantics. Topics
that have not received adequate attention have to be taken up seriously for
research, and there is an urgent need to develop the discipline with adequate
attention to interdisciplinary topics also.
2. Language-wise Analysis
A book review article by Barbara
Wallraff reviewed the book published by World Almanac & Book of Facts. This
article "Languages Spoken by at Least 1 Million People (2000)"
includes all the Indian languages spoken by at least one million people, as stated
in its title. English is spoken by 372 million people. Yet English is still the
world's second most common native language, though it is likely to be replaced
from its second position to the South Asian linguistic group whose leading
members are Hindi and Urdu, within fifty years. In 2050, according to a model
of language use that The English Company developed and named "engco"
after itself, the world will hold 1,384 million native speakers of Chinese, 556
million of Hindi and Urdu, and 508 million of English. The article also states
"Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language, Hindustani. As the
official language of Pakistan, it is written in a modified Arabic script and
called Urdu. As the official language of India, it is written in the Devanagari
script and called Hindi."
It is a known fact that the
above statement was true before independence or in pre-independence India,
before they developed into official literary languages. In the past Hindustani
emerged as a commonly used spoken form. Hindustani was a product of Hindi and
Urdu. When Hindustani was written in Arabic script it took more and more
Persian and Arabic loans for its development, while Hindi written in Devanagari
script, depended more on Sanskrit loans for its development. Hence Hindi and
Urdu parted from each other. So, keeping all these facts in view in the present
state of art, the above statement is too simplistic.
Coming to the present sample
data, major contribution are made to the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan families of
languages. In addition to general work on Dravidian languages, a few papers
were on Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu. In addition to general work on Indo-Aryan
languages, work is done on Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya,
Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, and Urdu. More than five papers were on Kashmiri
(8), Hindi (7) and Tamil (5). The rest of the languages mentioned here have
less than four (4) contributions each. In addition, three papers were there on
Indian English.
In my earlier study, the
language-wise distribution showed that the researchers worked on Hindi,
English, Tamil, Bengali, Sanskrit, Urdu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Maithili as
per the rank list (Sharada 1990). We find that the contributions for languages
like Kashmiri and Sindhi that were negligible as per my earlier study are now
in the forefront. We also see that the Tribal languages continue to draw hardly
any attention from the scholars in the present study also. There are hundreds
of such languages in India, and the study of these languages will have great beneficial
social impact on these marginalized communities.
3. Content Analysis of Indic
Articles
Some of the major subject
headings have been chosen in this study, and the content of articles are
discussed here.
General
Linguistics
M. S. Andronov, in his "A
Guide to Russian Publications on South Asian Linguistics," aims to
facilitate the search for pertinent books and articles published in Russian on
South Asian languages. Since it is intended for readers outside Russia, the
entries are transliterated in Roman and the titles of books and articles
translated into English. In the information on articles published in journals
or collection of papers the names of the latter are abbreviated, and
abbreviations are explained at the end. The excellent subject index appended to
the Guide makes the search for necessary items easier.
Lexicography
Probal Dasgupta raises a
question as to "whether generative grammar can make serious use of
lexicological ideas in syntax and semantics". This paper explores certain
ways in which lexicology can lead to explanatory adequacy with respect to
issues of the ignored elements in standard approaches to linguistics, without
losing the major results of mainstream work. The exploration here focuses on
the methodology and its potential, less on the phenomena themselves, and is
accordingly limited in scope and depth.
S. D. Majumdar discusses the
administrative technical terms in Bangla and states the following points:
- Major portion of the administrative technical terms in Bangla is of
tatsama origin.
- Tatsama words are not found in the regular spontaneous speech. This
has hindered the widespread use of this Bangla registral variation and
therefore less popular among the common people.
- Technical terms formed by loan translation are less popular due to
its artificiality.
- Borrowing foreign elements and tadbhava origin terms
are comparatively more popular because of their spontaneous flow and
evolution in the language taken place in the course of time.
Descriptive Linguistics
Sabine Iatridou discusses the
grammatical ingredients of Counter Factuality (CF) and states that
"similarly to English, many Indo-Aryan languages (Punjabi, Nepali, Hindi,
Assamese, Sindhi, Bengali) have a morpheme that marks ongoing events only, but
none of those morphemes are a sine qua non of CF morphology".
Phonology
G.Uma Maheshwar Rao states,
"Phonological correspondences of dissimilar sounds between Mongolian and
Dravidian may be taken as the crucial evidence of their genetic
relationship". He provides evidence in the form of lexical cognates and
phonological correspondences.
J. Prahbakara Rao's article
"Towards An Explanatory Paradigm In Phonology" deals with the
analysis of the motives and aims of modern phonology from systemic -
determinative linguistic point of view.
Bh. Krishnamurti discusses the
regularity of Sound Change Through Lexical Diffusion: A Study of "s".
Gondi, a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million people in central India, is a
chain of dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible. This study
looked at a two-step sound change, responsible for this dialect division. M. B.
Emeneau and G. Cardona present several issues related to Oriental languages and
literatures along with phonological history of Dravidian languages,
interpretation, and paraphrase of Vakyapadiya.
Syntax
D. N. S. Bhat is of the opinion
that "typological studies provide such a basis for the formulation of
grammatical theories, as they are primarily concerned with the differences that
exist among languages". He has tried to point out, some of the interesting
differences that he has noticed between Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian languages
and also correlate some of these differences and to provided functional
explanations for them wherever possible.
Bhat does not lag behind in
stating where Caldwell has misled either by the traditional grammars of
Dravidian languages or by the grammatical traditions (apparently of the
European stream) that Caldwell had been using. "The former approach helps
to understand and appreciate his contribution to the subject, whereas the
latter approach helps us to advance our knowledge". Bhat proposes to
follow the latter approach in this paper. He has pointed out in this paper
certain discrepancies and a deficiency that he has noticed in Caldwell's A Comparative
grammar of the Dravidian languages. He promptly admits that this is not meant
for belittling Caldwell's enormous contribution to our understanding of
comparative Dravidian but states that "the only way to advance in any
given subject is by critically examining the writings of previous
scholars."
Sabine Iatridou, in his paper
"The Grammatical Ingredients of Counter factuality"(CF) states that
"the Indo-Aryan languages, Punjabi, Hindi, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Bengali,
and Marathi must always use their habitual marker in CF morphology, even when
there is no habitual or generic meaning; that is, we are dealing with a fake
Hab."
R. Amrutavalli, in her
"Investigation in Kannada clause structure," has unveiled some issues
of broader theoretical significance and suggests that "tense is an
epiphenomenon and that it is the specification of mood that serves to confer
finiteness and to locate a predication in the real world."
D. N. S. Bhat examines the
word-formation rule and his hypothesis is that "word - formation rules
manifest systematic functional differences and that these differences are
correlated with the syntactic classes for which these rules furnish
words".
Usha Lakshmanan, in her paper
"The Acquisition of Relative Clauses by Tamil Children," reports the
findings of a cross-sectional study that investigated the acquisition of
relative clauses by 27 Tamil-speaking children who ranged in age from 2 years
and 11 months to 6 years and 6 months. A picture-cued production task was used
to elicit relative clauses from the child subjects.
J. Vacek discusses the Old Tamil
words missing in the DEDR and offers their etymological relation with the DEDR
etyma and also with possible Altaic and Uralic parallels.
S. Rajendran, while discussing
on the "Strategies In The Formation Of Compound Verbs In Tamil,"
states that "Tamil builds up its stock of verbs, not by suffixation but by
compounding a noun with a verb, which can be called as a verbalizer.
Suffixation, that was a process in the formation of verbs in the past is no
longer in vogue now. Tamil has only a limited number of basic verbs or simple
verbs. During its days of contact with Sanskrit, Tamil was piling up with its
verb stock by verbs from Sanskrit. It made use of a process of reduction and
suffixation by which it converted the Sanskrit nouns into verbs (e.g. pirayanam
'travel (N)' + pirayani 'traveller'). When the borrowing from Sanskrit to Tamil
is discouraged, Tamil resort to coin new verbs by the process of compounding.
The N + V combination is a productive process of forming new verbs from the
already existing stock of verbs and nouns".
Bhavani
Saravanan, while discussing the " Morphotactics: Patterns in Tamil
morphology," claims that "lexical items are marked as belonging to
specific lexical categories. Given constraints that is specific to lexical
categories, as well as the unpredictable distribution of irregularity in
Tamil". She rgues that "well-formed ness constraints on word-shape
are part of the lexicon itself, part of the grammatical, morpho syntactic and
categorical information makeup of the lexical entry".
B. Vijayanarayana, in his paper
"Agreement with special reference to Telugu," argues that "
Agreement in Telugu is confined to six contexts…"
Mallassery, S Radhakrishnan's
paper is a discussion on the language of Malavedas. "Veetaas has got a
language of their own which belongs to the Dravidian family of languages. This
language bears more similarities with Malayalam and little with Tamil. Veetaa
language preserves many ancient features that were lost by other cultivated
Dravidian languages, which are more useful to comparative and historical
linguistics."
B. P. Mahapatra, while
discussing the paper, "The Hypothesis Of Dravidian Sub - Stratum For
Magadhan Languages," states that "this brings us to the end of our
discussion on the structural parallels between the Magadhan and Dravidian
nouns. The case is equally strong in the other areas of grammar, particularly
in verbs and sentence formations. The only Magadhan language that lives in
close symbiosis with the Dravidian languages is Oriya while all other languages
of this group have little Dravidian contact. Besides, the Magadhan languages
and the Dravidian languages do not in the true sense of the word belong to a
single geographical area. On the contrary, Bengali, Assamese and the Bihari
languages are more pronouncedly exposed to non- Dravidian areas. Therefore, it
is the Dravidian sub-stratum hypothesis, which carried a lot more weight to be
poised for the Magadhan languages rather than borrowing and aerial contacts.
B. N. Patnaik, in his paper
"On A Certain 'Ra' In Oriya," states that this particular aspect has
escaped the attention of linguists so far. The paper tries to draw the
attention to an entity of the Oriya grammar that has all along escaped the notice
of linguists working on this language. It is concerned with the question of
labeling this entity. It proposes some solutions, each of which appears to be
satisfactory at the out set, but turns out to be unsatisfactory on evaluations.
It introduces the notion "Clausal Case marker" and argues that the
entity under reference can be most satisfactory assigned this label.
Panchanan
Mohanty, in his paper "On sonorization in Oriya," puts in the
following three points:
1.Oriya
sonorization rule, i.e.the change of /D, Dh/ to [R, Rh] respectively,
formulated by the traditional Oriya grammarians and Oriya linguists cannot
account for the total corpus of the Oriya data. So it has to be revised and
reformulated in order to accommodate all the counter examples cited against the
earlier rule.
2.A rule of /O/-deletion was postulated in the grammar of Oriya with the
sonorization rule.
3.The cranberry morph boundary, like the word boundary, is capable of blocking
phonological rules.
Kashi Wali compares wh-
question strategies in Marathi and Kashmiri, and suggests that the
"copying mechanism is a parametric variation of the S-structure Wh-
movement strategy in tensed clauses in both the languages". The same
author with Ashok K. Koul discusses Kashmiri clitics and their goal to explain
the anomalies by taking into account some recent developments. Further these
two authors with O. N. Koul state the traditional and modern perspective of
multiple case making in Kashmiri possessive, and argue that Kashmiri possessive
is not postpositional. They claim that it is in class with argument adjunct
elements.
These three authors also explain
the significance of topic in a V2 language with sufficient examples from
kashmiri language and concludes that it is the topic that draws the finite verb
to the second position. Another interesting study is the paper by Hook,P E and
Koul, A K wherein they describe the undersurface of the South Asian linguistic
area and more on syntax and causatives in Kashmiri with number of examples and
concludes that in certain respects Kashmiri shows affinities not with the rest
of South Asia but with Central and Northeast Asia.
Achala Misri Raina discusses the
verb second phenomenon in Kashmiri. Estella Del Bon writes on personal
inflections and order of clitics in Kashmiri. In brief, the issue of South
Asian Language Review journal pertained to the year 2000 discusses
different syntactical issues on Kashmiri language.
Kashi Wali &
Omkar N. Koul argue that "the nominative and the absolutive case relations
are structurally distinct and are governed by two distinct agreements. Their
evidence is based on case and agreement of the intransitive subjects in both
Kashmiri and Marathi". The same article appears in two journals, namely, Indian
Linguistics and South Asian Language Review.
B. V. Pawar & N. S.
Chaudhari have formulated a Context Free Grammar(CFG) for a reasonably complete
set of Marathi sentences. Implementing tomita's parsing algorithm tests the
power of the CFG. Its working is satisfactory. This work has demonstrated the
practical utility of the CFG formalism for computerized processing of the
Marathi sentences.
K. V. Subbarao demonstrates how
"evidence from the study of lexical anaphors, conjunctive participles and
prodrop in South Asian languages has implications to issues discussed in
syntactic theory especially principles proposed in Government and binding
framework and seemingly unrelated phenomena are mentally organized and reflects
the cognitive capabilities of human mind in grouping together under a single
head in the mental lexicon".
Probal Dasgupta offers reasons
why "generative grammar should borrow, not just the notion of indices in
the sense of the dependency grammarian Lucien Tesniere, but also part of its
methodological habitat."
Tanmoy Bhattacharya claims that,
"gerunds embedded a nominal aspectual head inside the DP and its formation
is shown to constitute evidence of NP movement".
Prashant Pardesi offers a
detailed alternative analysis of the Marathi passive construction.
Ghanshyam Sharma describes the
strategies involved in pragmatic explanations for expressing obligations of the
agent referred to in Hindi.
Achla Misri Rajna argues that
"honorificity in language has been studied extensively from the point of
view of social proximity and distance among the participants in speech
encounters, with consequences for issues regarding language and power in
society". The present paper views the phenomenon from the generative
linguistic grammar perspective, focusing upon its implications for questions of
language design and conditions on design.
Khateeb S. Mustafa, in his paper
"Gender In Urdu And Arabic," proposes to analyze and discuss the
gender-system in Urdu and Arabic and tries to look at the issues in contrastive
perspects.
A few interesting papers in
syntax are Seth Kulick, Robert Frank, and K. Vijayshanker 's Defective
Complements in Tree Adjoining Gramma"; Jeffrey Lidz's Echo Reduplication
in Kannada: Implications for a Theory of Word Formation; Rashmi Prasad, and
Michael Strube's Discourse Salience and Pronoun Resolution in Hind".
Sangeeta Sharma opines, while discussing her paper on Syntactical patterns in
advertising language, that the "need for giving maximum information in
minimum space has led to the use of modifier packed noun phrases. In the
linguistic analysis of these NPs, the most frequently used structure is DENH
[D-determiner, E-epithets, N-noun, H-headword]. That is a frequent use of
sub-modifiers too. Concerned to sentence, the position of a clause changes
according to the prominence a copywriter wants to give to the information
contained in it. The normal word order deviates and use a variety of figures of
speech found in imaginative literature".
Sociolinguistics,
Bilingualism and Multilingualism
M. Vijayanunni while discussing
the Bilingual scenario in India, is of the opinion that "Bilingualism or
multilingualism has greater significance than as a mere statistic depicting the
knowledge of another language, because it is a way of preserving
lingo-diversity in this age when many languages in the world are fighting a
losing battle for survival.It will be interesting to go into the pattern of
bilingualism and trilingual among speakers of various mother tongues providing
insights into the cultural and linguistic traits of different linguistic
groups, their willingness or compulsion to learn other languages and the extent
of interaction with other communities through the medium of languages."
Anirudh Deshpande states that
the "decline of Hindi in India and abroad is a well-established fact. Ironically
this downtrend became faster in independent India, owing to the growth of
cosmopolitan, westernized outlook. India has worsened the situation. English is
preferred to Hindi among the elite. But the knowledge of philosophy of a
society cannot be developed in a language that 90 percent of the masses do not
understand."
Aadil Amin Kak states that Urdu,
which 40-50 years back was mainly a language learned from schools, has
percolated into the ultimate citadel i.e., the home in Kashmir via the environment.
Urdu, with official patronage, has also acquired a status and position, which
has further helped to spread it. The process of Urdu inflow in the environment
and, mainly home, if left unchecked may, with the passage of time induce
Srinagarities to claim Urdu as their mother tongue instead of Kashmiri. Reading
and writing skills in terms of Kashmir have also fallen among the people of
Srinagar. The dwindling popularity of Kashmiri newspapers is a solid evidence
of this fact. On the other hand the Urdu newspaper business is thriving.
M. Ishtiaq states that "the
degree of tribal bilingualism varies both over the space and among the various
tribal groups. It is interesting to note that the tribes of the north - eastern
region have higher degree of bilingualism as against to those of the central
region. The tribes of the southern states specially belonging to the states of
Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have also shown higher order of
bilingualism."
The concentration of the tribal
bilingual population does show some relationship with the number of the tribal
groups but it does not show any relationship with the levels of bilingualism.
The patterns which emerge from the study reveal that very high, high, and
medium grades of concentration of the bilingual tribal population are found
among few tribal communities with larger population size as against to the
lower concentration which is found among the many groups spread over the larger
areas of the country.
Krishna Bhattacharya is of the
opinion that "for achieving maximum effectiveness with maximum speed,
literacy materials should be based on contrastive multidialectal studies."
Using this method, the learner will be able to switch over to the standard
written language at the end."
Rajaram Mehrotra examines the phenomenon
of reduction/deletion in Indian pidgin English spoken by the members of various
professional groups in Varanasi, India.
Sociolinguistics
The cover story by Bjeljac-Babic
Ranka's 6,000 languages: an embattled heritage discusses the
death of ten languages. The list of languages that died; reasons for the death
of languages and threat to multilingualism are discussed.
"English rises as India's
power language." a cover story by Robert Marquand reports on the
popularity and importance of the English language in India.
Another cover story by Barbara
Wallraff, "What Global Language?" focuses on the use of English as
the universal language, and states that "yet English is still the world's
second most common native language, though it is likely to cede second place
within fifty years to the South Asian linguistic group whose leading members
are Hindi and Urdu."
With reference to bilingualism,
Evan J. Norris examines language awareness and linguistic training in American
Indian bilingual programs; performance of linguistics training workshops;
purpose of the linguistics session, etc. The papers collected in Meaning,
Culture and Cognition volume reflect the changing perspectives and
orientations on meaning, culture and cognition, providing wider picture of linguistics,
both in its 'core' and 'periphery' in the context of Indian academia.
Amitav Choudhry's paper deals
with India as a multilingual country and the extinction of some of its minority
languages as majority languages gain ground. Points such as "Two official
languages of India; What led to the development of some languages at the
expense of others; Hierarchy of Indian languages; Rise in the use of English
language" are discussed.
While discussing the paper
"Speaking in Mother Tongues," Wilson-Smith, Anthony and Deziel,
Shanda reports on linguistic changes in Canada as of 1996. "Development of
Chinese as the predominant mother tongue of non-native English speaking
Canadians; How languages such as Spanish and Punjabi have entered Canada's
heritage language group and lists Punjabi in the Top 10 heritage language
groups."
Further the cover story
"Publish and Be Damned" by Wood, Chris; Nicol, John and Hunter,
Jennifer focuses on the publication of the Punjabi-language newspapers in
Canada. The 'Indo-Canadian times,' published by Dave Hayer after the 1998
murder of his father, who founded the paper in 1978; The political agenda of
the Indo-Canadian media; Opinions against violence in the Sikh community.Neill,
Heather describes the teaching technique of Alex Fellowes in Royal Shakespeare
Company's Prince of Wales Shakespeare course in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England
depicts in the Sample of an `Othello' rehearsal the use of Punjabi language in
the plays.Toohey, Kelleen; Waterstone, Bonnie and Jule-Lemke, Allyson examines
classroom activities engaged in by more and less experienced Punjabi-Sikh Grade
1 speakers of English and discusses how relationship between those speakers are
implicated in their speech activities. Three occasions in this classroom are
examined: A common, teacher-directed interaction; an excerpt of children at
play; and a playful interaction between an adult and a group of children.
Though Hindi is of the
Indo-Aryan family, one paper by Rajend Mesthrie, renders the title as
"Dravidian Hindi in South Africa". His aim is to characterize a
particular variety of Hindi in South Africa.
Rajendra Singh and Ad Backus
explores the possibility that, "code-switching/mixing patterns can and
should be considered as indices of bilingual proficiency". Rajend Mesthrie,
in his regional reports, offers a brief background necessary for the
understanding of the presence of South Asian languages in Mauritius. The
regional report on India is written by Bh.Krishnamurti In addition to reviewing
the books on Dravidian, he has provided a bibliography of significant books and
papers. A similar study on North America is done by Tej K. Bhatia, and mentions
that "it is the last report of the millennium that has covered the trends
in South Asian linguistics in North America through 1996". Hans Henry Hock
reports on the historical linguistics perspective in South Asia. He reports
that "South Asia or ancient India continues to hold great significance for
historical linguistics". The study is appended with a good number of
references. France Mugler, while reporting on South-East Asia and the South
Pacific, states that "the presence of Indian languages, of the two largest
language families of India, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, has added to the already
extremely rich multilingual nature of societies in these two neighboring
regions which also have in common indigenous languages of the Austronesian
family."
Communication
The papers in Communication
and the Recovery of the Real try to bridge the "rupture"
between human discourse and material condition, aiming at recovering the real
in communication
Psycholinguistics
Albert E. Kim, Bangalore
Srinivas, John C. Trueswell's paper discusses the Convergence of Lexicalist
Perspectives in Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics. S. Arulmozi
& P. Dasgupta, in their paper "Diglossia and education in Tamil"
state that their goal is to situate the problem of choosing appropriate Tamil
equivalents for English scientific terms in the context of the reception of
these equivalents in crucial domains of real language use. High school
education is the clearest case of such a domain.
Stuttering
Y. V. Geetha, discusses language
and linguistic determinants of stuttering and states that "Various
concomitant languages related and linguistic factors play a crucial role in the
onset, development and recovery of stuttering in majority of individuals.
Further states that the available theories and hypothesis on stuttering do not
provide adequate explanations pertaining to the nature of the language or
linguistic influences on stuttering. However, identifying and controlling these
variables have important implications in the over all management of stuttering
which otherwise become a life-long handicap to the individuals in terms of
their all round achievements in life."
Language Teaching
K. Mahalingam, in his paper
"What can go into the preparation of language instruction materials?"
proposes a model for the preparation of language instruction materials keeping
in view the heterogeneous social, cultural, ethnic and linguistic composition
of India. It aims also to discuss in detail each component of the model and
argues the necessity to identify and quantify the extent of extra and
non-linguistic aspects that can go into this model.
Tariq Rahman seeks to raise a
number of questions such as "what ideological biases are imparted through
language teaching texts?, with what aim they are imparted?", etc. and
concludes that "Urdu medium schools are meant to indoctrinate the masses
into becoming religious, nationalistic and militaristic." The questions he
has put forth are questions of the survival of millions in South Asia.
Suchitra Behal, in her paper
"Pupils put off `boring' Hindi," reports on the survey conducted in
India to determine school children's attitudes toward studying the Hindi and
English languages.
Lucy Pickering and Caroline
Wiltshire examines the realization of accent in Indian English (IE) compared to
American English produced by the teaching assistants in similar contexts.
"In teaching discourse, a lexically accented syllable is often realized in
IE with a relative drop in frequency and without a reliable increase in
amplitude".
B. A. Sharada stresses the need
of usage of different library documents at different stages of second language
teaching and learning keeping in view the eclectic method adopted in the
Southern Regional Language Centre of The Central Institute of Indian Languages,
Mysore.
Computational Linguistics
P. Uma Rani, while discussing
her paper "A Unification-Based Approach To Natural Language Analysis,"
states that "Unification-based formalisms are economical because they
employ only those mechanisms already assumed to be present elsewhere in the
grammar and they are more expressive and more computationally tractable than
other formalisms because of their mathematical properties. Furthermore, their
well-built grammaticality conditions add to the efficiency of the grammars and
as these formalisms possess the properties of commutative ness, associative
ness and distributiveness, they could be used for both parsing and generating
natural language text with the help of a single grammar".
Mark Needleman discusses the
Unicode character set and the Unicode Consortium, which developed the character
set and is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the set. Importance of
Unicode to the library community; History of the Unicode's development;
Technical aspects of the standard; Growth of new implementations in hardware
and software versions of Unicode are discussed. "The Unicode Standard
defines codes for characters used in the major languages written today. Among
the scripts included are Latin, Greek, Bopomofo, Cyrillic, Armenian, Hebrew,
Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada,
Malayalam, Thai, Lao, Georgian, Tibetan, Japanese Kana, modern Korean Hangul,
etc".
Literature - Theory and
Criticism
Nirmal Selvamony discusses the
syllogistic circles in Tolkappiyam. Syllogistic was known as
kantikai in Tamil and explains kantikai under 3 major heads: etymological
meaning of the term, members of kantikai, and history of the concept.
G. Chandrasekhar & H. R.
Singh have tried to analyze the word-count data of certain sampled pieces of
Sanskrit prose and tried to compare the results with those of foreign languages
like English and Russian.
Book Reviews
Chelva Kanaganayakam analyzed
the monograph written by Subha Rao, which questioned the validity of the entire
corpus of Indo-Anglian writing on the grounds of relevance to an Indian
audience. The review presented a criticism of Rao's work focusing on his core
of his argument and the consequence of the failure of Indian writing in
English.
Bernard Comrie reviewed the book
The Dravidian Languages, edited by Sanford B. Steever. He stated
that the volume succeeded in achieving Steever's aim to satisfy the curiosity
of layman in knowing the perspective of the individual languages since the
choice of languages for the descriptive sketches covers not only the genetic
breadth of Dravidian but also a range of languages in terms of social function
including a useful map of language location.
Rajendra Singh reviewed the book
Toward a Critical Sociolinguistics edited by himself. "The
overall purpose of this book is to force sociolinguists to question their
current assumptions about the ways in which they should conduct research.
Singh's book is a compilation of essays criticizing the state of
sociolinguistics today. These essays range in scope from syntax to language
planning. Singh sees current sociolinguistics as missing the 'joyfulness' of
speech in an irresponsible manner". As Singh notes in his introduction,
"the essays included in the book leave him with a 'sad sense of
incompleteness' (p. 3). What is lacking from this book is a clear definition of
what is-meant by the term 'critical sociolinguistics', along with an
explanation of how we might go about it."
The same book was reviewed by E.
Annamalai, arguing that "a new paradigm is to ask fundamentally different
questions" because of "the dissatisfaction about the inadequacy of
explanation of the phenomenon under investigation empirically and
conceptually." He recorded that the papers in the book expressed such
dissatisfaction about the currently dominant ways of doing Sociolinguistics and
suggested a direction for change. Aparna Rao reviewed the book The Crisis
in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace, by Sumit Ganguly. She
stated that, "Ganguly refers to the conflict as 'part of the second wave
of ethnolinguistic assertion' , but fails to note that while the Kashmiri
language played a major role in the concept and practice of kashmiriyat
even in the 1980s, it was no longer taught in schools from the 1960s onwards,
and was entirely replaced by Urdu -- the official language of Pakistan."
Arjuna Prakrama reviewed The
native speaker: multilingual perspectives edited by Rajendra Singh.
This book explores an important and theoretically vexed issue on the 'native
speaker', using perspectives and insight derived from the experience of
language contexts in which English, coexists with other languages in
multilingual settings.
Kathleen Connors reviewed the
book Social psychological perspectives on second language learning
edited by R.K.Agnihotri, A.L.Khanna, and I.Sachdev. She wrote that this was a
collection of articles on the role of attitudes and motivation in language
learning, use, and evaluation, and rather a preponderance of Indian linguists
amongst the contributors was felt throughout the book; the data was well chosen
and presented in a way that reflected a unique understanding of these languages.
Jayakant Lele reviewed the book Nehru
and the language politics of India by Robert D. King. The main focus of
the book was "on defense of Nehru's feet-dragging on two major policies
while he was the prime Minister of India: linguistic reorganization of the
states and adoption of Hindi as the national language." King, however,
also had a theory about language politics.
Tobert D King reviewed Language,
Education and Society by Bh. Krishnamurti, an anthology of his selected
publications. King calls the author of this book as "tough minded and
commonsensical". Luc V Baronian reviewed Annie Montaut edited Les
lanngues d'Asie du sud that discusses a general perspective of
multilingual South Asia and includes a history of Indian linguistics and the
political history of India. Otto M. Ikome reviews R.Narasimhan's Language
behavior, acquisition and evolutionary history. "Speaking or
producing language in any format is, for the author, a 'behavior' akin to
sleeping, dancing, crying, or frowning. The author, being an information
scientist, had the courage to provide some pointers to linguists".
Ken C. Erickson reviewed the
book Lectures against Sociolinguistics by Rajendra Singh.
According to him "the ideas about power and linguiticality within the book
will be an essential element in training the next generation of scholars
interested in social world." The same book has been reviewed by E.
Annamalai. He states that, "The issues raised in the book about current
sociolinguistic studies are of fundamental importance to the discipline and to
society, and it is vital to alert students to them. This is done admirably in
the book with Singh's self-assured, informed, articulate, combative style, in
an engaging manner."
Rajender Singh edited an
anthology, Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2000.
This is reviewed by P. P. Giridhar. After reviewing each paper Giridhar
concludes that, "it is indeed a rich feas . . . for the South Asianist for
whom it is more than the sum of its parts."
Anjani Kumar Sinha reviewed the
book Urdu: an essential grammar and commented that it was a very
good book which explained grammatical points lucidly and precisely.
Ludmila Khokhlova reviewed the
book A Historical Syntax of late Middle Indo-Aryan(Apabhramsha)
and stated that, "this is the second book aimed to remove the lacuna in
the knowledge of Middle Indo-Aryan dialects."
R. L. Schmidt and Meena Grover
reviewed the book How do you say it in English: A Dictionary of Hindi -
English idioms and proverbs and concluded that "the work is useful,
compendious and unique and its usefulness is not seriously impaired by its
minor defects."
Other book reviews worth
mentioning were B. Damodar Rao's review of the book The Calf Became an
Orphan: A Study in Contemporary Kannada Fiction, by Robert J. Zydenbos.
Victor Golla reviewed the
textbook An Introduction to the Languages of the World, by
Anatole V. Lyovin.
David L Gitomer reviewed the
book The Sanskrit Epics by John Brockington. George Cardona,
reviewed the book Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions
in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages, by Richard
Salomon. The same book has been reviewed by Richard H. Davis also. Alice
Davison reviewed the book Kashmiri: A Cognitive-Descriptive Grammar,
by Kashi Wali and Omkar N. Koul.
4. Some observations on
Indian linguistic journals
The coverage for the present
study is only one year (the year 2000). We notice that the articles published
were really thought-provoking. Indian linguistics research actually
demonstrated its depth in these articles. Starting from the Magadhan languages
upto the computer applications to Indian languages including the Unicode almost
all aspects were dealt with.
The following may be suggested
as the few minor flaws in relation to the Linguistics journals published in
India.
A periodical is expected to be
published at fixed/regular intervals. Through the journals, an author will have
an immediate platform to present his/her findings and receive the readers'
opinion. It is expected that the periodicals would be published at certain
regular intervals and that these journal would maintain their status in the
discipline. However, here are accounts of journals with the Volume pertaining
to the year 2000 brought out in June 2002. Though it is mentioned as quarterly,
half yearly, etc., often these issues were all clubbed in one single volume.
Among the Linguistics journals published in India, IJDL (International Journal
of Dravidian Linguistics) continues to be published following a regular
schedule.
One more expectation about any
journal is that it should contain the latest developments in the discipline. As
for the Indian journals, how far this statement is true? In one journal the
author has stated that the paper was prepared during 1996. If the journal is
theme-based and feels that it is incomplete without the inclusion of such an
article, then the article also commands some value after it is updated. There
are examples of the same articles appearing in two journals published in India,
which is an ethical issue, and such a trend does not sound good. There are also
the instances of publishing articles that fall outside the domain of focus of
the journal, just because these articles may have been from a foreign author.
These few factors certainly do not contribute to the healthy academic
development of the discipline.
The Annexure lists the articles
covered in this study.
REFERENCES
Sharada, B.A.(1989) Ressearch in
Dravidian Linguistics: A quantitative Analysis. IJDL, Vol
XVIII(1).P.111-123.
Sharada, B.A. and Devaki,
L(1990) Contribution of Journal articccles by Indian Linguists at the
international scene. Annals of Library Science and Documentation
Vol.37(1),P.35-52.
Sharada, B.A.(1991)
Multiple-authorship pattern in Linguistics. Library Science
Vol.28(2), pp.96-99.
Singh, Udaya Narayana (1999)
Indic Articles: an over view. Yearbook of South Asian Languages and
Linguistics 2000. Edited by Rajender Singh. New Delhi: Sage
Publications.