Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

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

This paper discusses the issue o f Machine Translation with reference to Kashmiri and EngHsh language pair. The focus in this paper is on the study o f verb word class and the divergence caused by different subclasses of verbs in the said language pair. The divergence is illustrated with reference to the case marking of verbs and properties of verb classes including causative verbs, conjunct verbs, dative verbs and compound verbs.

The paper aims to provide a description of pitch accent as a significant feature of Gurezi Shina. The description has been presented with the help of minimal pair of words. Pitch accent graphs have also been presented to highlight the accented as well as unaccented syllables. The data has been collected from native Shina speakers during various field trips to the Gurez Valley. The data has been transcribed using SilDoulos IPA 93. For analysis of pitch accent both PRAAT and Speech Analyzer (SA) has been used. For sound editing GoIdWave freeware has been used. The nature of the paper is descriptive.

Tagging may be defined as assigning words their appropriate parts of speech in a corpus. It can be done manually by using a software tool by human taggers. It can also be accomplished automatically by means o f a computer program, with no or little human intervention. The labels attached to words by a human agent or a computer program, are called as Tags. The computer program is called as a Tagger. This paper will attempt to propose a preliminary architecture for a Rule-based tagger o f Kashmiri.

The present paper is an attempt to study the various aspects o f language acquisition and language attitudes among the native speakers o f Kishtwar community. It provides an insight to the complex dynamics o f language development in the multilingual society o f Kishtwar.

The present paper takes up the study of Kashmir-Pahari speech variety and aims to describe the basic noun morphology. Kashmir-Pahari is a variety of Western Pahari spoken in Reasi, Narwal, Kamah, etc. districts of Jammu and Kashmir. The paper aims to study the noun inflections i.e. Number, Gender, and Case in depth.

This paper explores the language attitudes among Burushos o f Kashmir valley and is based on the field work that investigators undertook. This paper utilizes a well-designed questionnaire for the problem in question.

In urban dialectology, the correlation between the linguistic variability and the social variables is very important. Social class, age, sex have proven to be most likely independent variables to correlate with linguistic innovations. This paper discusses the process of ongoing linguistic change which is the outcome of social differentiation. Following the need for field investigations of linguistic innovations for the mechanism of change, the linguistic variable investigated in the present study of Kashmiri dialects is (r) involved in an ongoing linguistic change.

Different languages differ in expressing politeness either by employing various politeness strategies in order to mitigate face threatening acts or manifesting the language in such a way that its lexicon and morphology itself expresses politeness in its structure. The present paper attempts to establish the politeness expressions employed by Kashmiri speakers in their speech.

English has occupied a unique place in the educational system of the valley. Fluency in English enhances an individual's personality, presentation skill, confidence and eventually his career. In second language learning, sociopsychological factors play a major role in enhancing language learning. The present study focuses on what is considered as the two most important variables: gender and schooling. This paper analyse the relation o f gender and schooling with the proficiency of English language in both General English students and Functional English students.

This paper presents a general account o f different language interaction phenomena that are prevalent in the present day Kashmiri speakers.

The paper puts forth aspect and mood in Poguli which is being spoken in Pogal- ^arislan area of Fir Panjal range o f Jammu and Kashmir and this belt has inguistic diversity in itself considering the wide variety o f languages/dialects spoken in that belt. The paper begins with the brief introduction to the Poguli, society and the region which is followed by a study o f theoretical aspects of aspect and mood and examining its types and role. The main focus o f the paper is on verbal aspect and mood in Poguli.

the present article is an attempt to explore the concept o f polysemy and homon\'my in language and linguistics. It tries to elaborate various approaches to the study of polysemy and homonymy pro\ iding examples in the semantic field o f body part terms in Tibetan' language. It discusscs the polysemy o f the body part terms 'go ' 'head' and ^kha/ 'mouth* in Tibetan language and shows how the study o f polysemous categories plays important role in linguistic analysis in terms of prototypes, metonymy and metaphor that are central to cognitive liniiuistics.

The present paper explores the use o f language in the Novel ''Sea o f Poppies written by Amitav Ghosh, which was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for Vlan Booker Prize 2008. The present paper explores how the author in the novel depicts the characters using the language which connotes depth and intellectually stimulating plot twists. Moreover, the paper explores how the colonial history of Asia had affected the lives o f people and how the present is shaped by that era.

The paper present the Phonological description o f Sheikha Gal (Watali) with focus on the segmental part o f the phonological system including consonants, vowels, diphthongs, syllables, including their distribution and arrangement in the language. The Watal or Sheikhs belong to a social segment o f people who traditionally are assumed to belong to the lowest strata o f the society.

This paper examines the question of language maintenance and shift in migrant Kashmiri Pundits in Jammu. The paper is based on an empirical study examining language usage in different domains across different age groups.

The paper is about the means of naming, that is the ways in which Indian cuisine w ere named rather than the meaning o f names in the old-fashioned etymologica sense, h is ver>' much, however, about the meaning o f names in much broader sense, and it derives from the conviction that to elucidate this is essentially a task for historian. Moreover, the paper is an attempt to manifest the grammar o f names with regards to hidian cuisine.

This article seeks to investigate the role played by background knowledge of technical subject in quality of translation. To this end, two classes of senior undergraduate students in translation studies w^ere chosen and made comparable through administration of Nelson reading comprehension and vocabulary test to ensure validity of the results. Before attempting translation, the first class was informed of the necessai-y background knowledge about the context. -In the other group, the students were asked to translate the text without raising their schemata on the topic. The result of the study show significant difference between the two groups. To triangulate the study, a questionnaire was also included. The outcome of the survey again verified the significant role of background knowledge of technical subject in the quality of translation in that it helped the students reeontextualize the translated text in a far more sensible and functional manner. The results of the study offer safe proof for advocating the feeding of background know'ledge as a necessary step in translation o f specific texts as the organization of knowledge in SL is different from TL.

Complex predicates which are listed in the dictionaries, are lexically autonornous units. These as generally used as idiomatic expressions where the meanings are not directly related to their constituents. Very few number of verbs function as light verbs or operators in combination with nouns in the construction ot complex predicates. The frequent operators used in Kashmiri in the formation of complex predicates are a:s- 'b e \ kar- ‘do', di- ’give', v/- 'come' . he 'take' tul 'lift' khe' ‘eat’and lag- 'stick/apply*. In this paper, w'c will attempt to classify these complex predicates in different groups and try to analyze how' in these constructions the meaning of the verb used as an operator is changed and has different shades of meanings.

Arabic is dealt with in this article as SVO at spell-out and VSO at the logical form (LF). Thus, the objective of this article is to examine the actual components o f complementizers and check their syntactic effect on word order o f Arabic in subordinate subjunctive constructions at both word orders. To get VSO at LF, the verb is unable to move higher than the tense node [T''] whose specifier position is occupied by the subject and also the head position of the complementizer phrase [C ’] is filled with a complementizer. In such a structure, the word order o f Arabic subjunctive is disturbed and becomes as : a complementizer, NP- subject and V which is, in fact, ungrammatical at all levels o f syntax. To get good results, the data are analyzed with reference to Chomsky's (1981, 1986a, 1986b and 1995) Minimalist Views. The study illustrates that “adjunction" is an essential mechanism to project a non argument maximal projection in the syntactic hierarchy to let the internal verb land in a correct position in VSO order at LF. The study concludes that, in SVO, universal features including (i) the nominative case and (ii) theta marking are properly checked in order not to violate principles o f syntax. Other significant results indicate that components o f complementizers give different syntactic functions before being used as complementizers in Arabic syntax.

This paper examines the interaction of Tone and case system in Tenyidie, a Tibeto-Burman language, using the description based on Dixon, 1994. A hierarchy o f Case System in Tenyidie is set up by incorporating tones and Suffixes for differentiation o f cases.

In this paper I have made an attempt to define the patterns of usage and pronunciation of Bengali consonants and diacritics when these characters are found to be used in formation of non-allographed words in the language. The basic goal of this study is to fmd out how consonants and diacritics are used in formation o f non-allographed words and how these characters are pronounced within words in standard Bengali speech. Another goal of this study is to investigate how the original pronunciation of consonants is aftected at certain contexts o f their usages w^ithin the words. For this study I have utilized a lexical database o f nearly three hundred thousand words tokenized from a text corpus of nearly five million words o f modem Bengali written prose. This is, perhaps, the first study of its kind that can lead the Bengali speakers to understand how the pronunciation of non-allographed words can reflect on the standard Bengali speech habits. The application relevance o f this study may be attested in several domains o f mainstream and applied linguistics, such as, language description, language teaching, dictionary compilation, usage-based grammar writing, language processing, language cognition, speech recognition and synthesis, and text-to-speech conversion.

The present paper takes into account the two sets of linguistic patterns of Thai and Hindi kinships. Kinship patterns not only reflect the underlying socio-cultural patterns in a society but also help us to understand inheritance and succession laws in a society. The Thai family and relationship system refers to the relationship by blood or marriage. It is observed that the linguistic patterns are governed by ‘'culture system” not the “nature system”. Some cultures emphasize “patrilineality”, while some cultures emphasize “matrilineality”. Thai families seem to emphasize matrilineality because in Thai families, the new couple stay in her parents' house for a while and the son-in-law helps in household chores.

In this paper, I investigate echo-wh-questions in Turaif dialect o f Arabic (TA). The paper reveals some novel facts concerning the syntax o f echo-wh-questions in TA. In TA, the wh-word in echo-wh questions appears in the left periphery o f the clause higher than the wh-word o f non-echo-wh-questions; which is strange if we take into account the results o f other studies done on echo questions in languages like English, Spanish, and Russian among other languages where it is claimed that the echo-wh-word always appears in situ inside the Utterance headed by a C(=Ceq) that takes the U as its complement where the CP of the utterance is being frozen), Sobin ((1978, 1992, 2009 ,2010) among others) and the echo-whword is being bound by the superior Ceq. Being exempted from locality restriction, island constraints, Ross (1967), and the issue o f scope as well as being exempted from superiority effect, I argue that wh-word in those echo-whquestions is base generated in its surface position in the left periphery o f the clause in the Echo Phrase (EP). I argue, under the Minimalist Approach Chomsky (1993, 1995, 2000) that the wh-word in the echo-wh-questions is directly merged in the Echo Phrase (EP) since merging is more economical than move. However, I conclude this paper by hypothesizing that there exists a speculative stage in which the wh-word is split into two items a wh-word (wh) and a reusmpive pronoun (RP), (wh+RP); I assume the wh-word directly merges to check the EP in the left periphery o f the clause and the resumptive pronoun merges to check the phi-features on the verb. The contribution of the paper lies in the fact that it investigates echo questions in a dialect that is, to my knowledge, heretofore uninvestigated; and adds to our understanding o f the syntax o f echo questions.