Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

Print ISSN: 0974-3421 Online ISSN: 0974-3421

Kohistani is a Dardic language spoken in the upper parts of the Swat and Panjkora valleys (Swat Kohistan and Dir Kohistan), in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (Grierson, 1919). Kohistani speakers are also settled in the area of Hyhama, Kupwara district and Ganderbal district of Kashmir valley. Kohistani spoken in Kashmir has not been explored so much. The present paper takes up the description of Kohistani verb morphology spoken in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir.

Balti, the prevailing language all over Baltistan, belongs to the ‘Tibeto-Burman’ family of languages (Grierson, 1909). All Tibeto-Burman languages are verbfinal (SOV), so is the case of Balti which too have subject-object-verb pattern.The languages of the subcontinent have been studied at length yet there has not been a comprehensive study of Balti spoken in Kargil (Jammu and Kashmir State). The present paper aims to discuss the number and gender system in Balti (spoken in Kargil).

Error Gravity (Hereafter EG) is the study of errors which tries to compare the seriousness of errors in terms of their frequency or their percentage of occurrence. In other words, it shows the fact that errors are not to be considered/ treated equally. Rather there seems to be an order in which some errors are considered as more grave than others, thus, they will come first and others will follow in a sequential order. The present paper intends to discuss about three major points: 1. Investigating different types of semantic errors produced by Odia students while writing in English. 2. Enquiring into the frequency of the above types of errors. 3. Finding out which type of semantic error is more serious than the other by employing a statistical method on the basis of their frequency. The paper begins with a brief introduction to the concept of “Error Gravity” followed by a pertinent review of literature related to EG. The paper also presents a neat statistical analysis of different types of semantic errors committed by the Intermediate Odia students which leads to determine the gravity of each error types. Finally the paper throws light on the hierarchy of these semantic errors.

The aim of this paper is to through the light on the aspects like borrowing, code mixing and hybridization of English terms used in Moradabad Brass Industry. The workers in the industry are central to determine organization’s success and therefore it is necessary to examine how the communication takes place among knowledge workers, manufacturers, sellers and buyers in the industry. Several terms are borrowed from English language in domain specific language (language of Moradabad Brass Industry). The term borrowing refers to the full adoption of terms from contemporary languages during the process of secondary term formation. Some loans of this type of borrowing prove successful and are fully incorporated into a foreign language. Language borrowing has been an interest to various fields of linguistics for some time. The workers mix two or more languages in their speech and the words of other language are also hybridized with the elements of first language.

Kashmiri English language pair exhibits different kinds of translation divergences like addition, substitution, categorical divergence, conflational divergence. In addition there are many grammatical constructions and grammatical phenomena which exhibit considerable divergence. This paper presents an in-depth account of translation divergence across different tense types. Divergence across tenses happen due to many differences in grammatical phenomena and their expression like inflections, honorifics, proximate and remote kind of pasts. There is a one to many translation pattern between English and Kashmiri and this is illustrated for every tense type.

This article is a cognitive semantic account of polysemy in the semantic field of perception verbs in Ladakhi language. It explores why and how our experience and understanding of the five senses constrains and shapes the way in which we create mappings between the physical domain of perception onto more metaphorical and abstract conceptual domains of experience. The different extensions of meaning in these verbs have not taken place as a result of chance, but are grounded in our own conceptualisation of these sense modalities. Therefore, the focus is on the analyses of the meanings of perception verbs in Ladakhi and it shows how the study of polysemous categories play important role in linguistic analysis in terms of prototypes and metaphors that are central to cognitive linguistics.

The paper puts forth reduplication in Poguli which is being spoken in Pīr Panjāl1 of Jammu and Kashmir and is a linguistic diversity in itself considering the wide variety of languages/dialects spoken in that belt. It begins with the brief introduction to the language and the region which is followed by a study of theoretical aspects of reduplication delving its types and role. The paper focuses on complete reduplication and echo-word formation of Poguli.

Kashmir valley is a multilingual area where languages belonging to different language families are found. Kashmiri forms the mother tongue of majority of population. Urdu serves as the second language followed by English. Both the languages occupy an important position in the linguistic setup of the valley. Given this linguistic scenario majority of Kashmiri youth are multilingual and use the languages for different purposes. The present paper is an attempt to study the language preferences and choices of Kashmiri youth in different domains.

Distance language learning has attracted the interests of Second/ Foreign language teachers over the world as a result of new developments in Information and Communication Technology. Although self-regulation, autonomy, independency of the learners, and strategy development play a central role in distance language learning (white 2003), some distance contexts used for teaching purposes do not consider the above learner-based principles. This study explores distance language learner strategies among 60 participants studying English for Academic Purposes within Moodle distance context. Two questionnaires were given to the participants to find out which strategy they used and at what level. The questionnaires (background questionnaire and SILL questionnaire Version 7.0) proposed by Oxford (1990) explored 50 strategies. The results showed that although distance language learners have their own specific patterns of strategy, they are low level strategy users at a moodle-based distance language learning context. Furthermore, we found no statistical significant differences between males and females using strategies within the distance context.

This paper investigates the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors involved in bilingual Texting in general and bilingual Short Message Service (hereafter, SMS) in particular.1 It has two dimensions: first, it presents a survey of scriptal, phonological and pragmatic factors involved in SMS and texting. Second, it looks into the effect of bilingualism while performing SMS based tasks. The questions that it seeks to address include the following: What scriptal, phonological and pragmatic factors are involved in texting and SMS activities? How are text messages in two different writing systems coded and decoded?2 How does bilinguality of an SMS impact its efficiency as a means of communication? In order to address these questions two SMS based experimental studies were conducted on 40 post-graduate and research students at the University of Hyderabad. Both the studies focused on the intricate and essential relationship between SMS strategies and bilingualism. The present work reflects the texting behaviour in general, though its focus remains on SMS texts and bilingualism in Hindi-English (hereafter, HE) and Malayalam-English (hereafter, ME) texts. A study related to this theme titled ‘the effect of bilingualism on communication efficiency in text messages’ was conducted by Carrier and Benitez in 2010. Their study was based on English-Spanish speakers' texting patterns, wherein the script of the text is more or less same and the criterion employed by them was size of the texts. However, the criteria proposed in this paper include the time consumed in keying and processing the text, ratings by peers and prospective recipients and the size of the text. The findings of this study contradict the previous work. This paper looks into the factors that could have resulted in the dichotomous results between the two studies. The Introduction deals with the ways in which various technical terms and expressions have been used in this paper. Following that a review of literature dealing with text messages’ past, present and future has been presented. The next section deals with text entry methods and bilingual texting. This section is followed by the two experiments. That is followed by the conclusions and references.

The present paper takes up the study of Khah speech variety and aims to describe its basic morphology. The study also aims to highlight points of similarity between Khah and Poguli and/or Khah and Kashmiri.

Teaching Reading in EFL and ESL contexts has been challenging not only for the non-native factors but also for various inherent systemic issues. Significant among these issues are the ineffective use of existing materials, lack of material adaptation and obliviousness of the teaching process towards aims and objectives of the course and lessons because teaching is often mistaken as the completion of the course texts. The Present paper seeks to analyse and reach on some suggestions in the light of aforesaid aspects of the teaching of Tapestry Series (Reading) 1-3 in Department of English, King Khalid University, Abha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

This paper discusses the dynamics of code-mixing of Urdu in the context of TV commercials which are relayed from Delhi Doordarshan and which are generally classified as Hindi commercials. This paper discusses various factors which make Urdu as one of the foremost choices for code mixing in TV commercials.

Budhali is a link language in Budhal (Rajouri, J&K). There are three ethnolinguistic communities that live in Budhal viz. Kashmiri, Pahari and Gojri. There are native speakers of all the three languages. Budhali, as per the people who speak it, is the language of the descendants of Raja Budh Pal primarily, but at present it is used by all the communities as a link language. It has no literature and also lacks a script. The Census of India groups Budhali speakers under Pahari language. However, Pahari and Budhali, though resembling with one another, are linguistically different speech varieties. The contemporary status of the language is that it is mother tongue to a significant number of people living in Budhal, Dandoot, Keval, Phalni, Triganyi etc. of the Rajouri district. The present paper is a descriptive note on Budhali, so far an unreported language.

The formation of a complex predicate is a unique phenomenon. There are very clear and categorical syntactic, morphological and semantic strategies to form the construction. The formation of the predicate as ‘complex predicate’ manifests very distinct and marked linguistic evidences which are measurable in terms of case-association, valences, thematic role and agreement features from that of the simple-predicate. The present paper is an attempt to examine how the combination of a Noun/Adjective to a verb and making a predicate actually strengthens the verb in the process of making a complex predicate and the combining of a verb to another verb weakens the verb in producing a complex predicate. There is also an attempt in the paper to show how and why the complex predicates are produced or formed in different languages, and the cost that the natives have to pay in terms of acquiring such complex predicate is comparably cheaper. The acquisition of these complex predicate make the speakers more competent to master some very useful aspects of language and make them comfortable to handle different contexts of the use of the language. The paper examines the case of ‘compound verb and conjunct verb’ in particular to exemplify the instances of ‘strengthening and weakening’ processes of linguistic features of complex predicate in Hindi-Urdu.

Bakovic (2005), states that the avoidance of “sufficiently similar” adjacent consonants, similar except for a small subset of specific features, is the result of interaction between assimilation process and anti-gemination (here, epenthesis); that is to say, epenthesis applies between adjacent non-identical consonants if and only if assimilation between the non-identical consonants would lead to the creation of a geminate. Pajak (2009), following Bakovic, provides data from the phonological behavior of pro-clitics and the Coronal Place Assimilation, CPA, in Polish in support of the primary consequence of this analysis and shows that there are contextual constraints on geminates and argues that geminate is avoided via epenthesis in a non-vowel adjacent contexts. In this paper, using Optimality Theory (McCarthy and Prince (1993, 1994) and Prince and Smolensky (1993)), this paper presents an account for the definite article “l” assimilation found in the phonology of the dialect of Turaif Arabic (TA henceforth); a dialect spoken in the northern region of Saudi Arabia. The data show that it is not only adjacent consonants with a small subset of specific features that could result in assimilation but also adjacent consonants that are very different with no shared feature/s or with one and only one shared feature, (+coronal); in addition, the data in one hand support the essence of Pajak’s segmental condition on germination; that is to say, gemination always occurs in vowel-adjacent consonants in VCCV contexts. However, on the other hand, the paper, contradicting Pajak’s finding, shows that single-vowel-adjacent contexts are also good environment for assimilation and germination; neither epenthesis nor deletion is required in a single-vowel-adjacent geminate. I attribute the behavior of the definite article ‘l’ to a number of highly-ranked interacting constraints in the dialect, *CdefartCC, Max (C), and Dep (V). it appears that this phenomenon is just a language specific phenomenon that occurs only and only with the definite article ‘l’ in Turaif Arabic.

Sociometric approach forms one of the important approaches in transaltin studies. The translation criteria deriving from the sociosemiotic approach are “correspondence in meaning and similarity in style and function,” which turns out to be well suited to verify the quality of fiction translation. “Correspondence in meaning” is actually correspondence in designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning; “similarity in style” is similarity in both authorial style and text style, “similarity in function” is similarity in the six functions advocated by Peter Newmark. The translation of meanings and reflection of styles and functions, therefore, should rely on both linguistic context and non-linguistic context, i.e. culture and society. A qualified translator should acquire language competence and cultural knowledge of both TL and SL, and take pains to reduce the loss and distortion in his/ her translation. Thus, the translation may achieve the translation criteria—correspondence in meaning and similarity in style and function. The recognition of this very fact of the textual and contextual nature of translating have positive consequences for the understanding of translation as a whole. Based on the linguistic textual nature of translation and its relevance for translation practice, the paper attempts to show the results of an analytical study that has been carried out to show the Initiator´s and Translator´s communicative purposes in the original and the translated text of Abdus Samad’s Urdu fiction “Khabon ka Savera”. The focus of the paper is mainly upon the semantic dimensions of the “hyper text” a term used by Genette (1982)

The present study “Acoustic space in Kashmiri Vowels” will take into consideration the acoustic space of the vowels in Kashmiri which will mainly focus on the first two formants and duration. As depicted by earlier studies on Kashmiri vowels, duration is considered as important phonemic criteria to distinguish between vowels. Thus, based on the backdrop of these facts, the present study aims to undertake an acoustic study of Kashmiri vowels with a focus on formants and duration