Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

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

Communicative Strategies are conceived of as effective problem solving devices employed by learners of a second language to cope up with communicative difficulties. While these strategies can be effectively employed in both spoken and written media, however studies undertaken on their role in the later medium are very few. The present study aims to understand the use of the Communicative Strategies being employed in Facebook communication by the students of university of Kashmir. Since Facebook communication essentially involves the written medium, the paper will attempt to highlight the role of these strategies in this form of communication. Effort will be made to explain the language choice among English, Urdu and native Kashmiri, made by these students while communicating on Facebook. Furthermore the study has highlighted the declining use of Perso-Arabic script for writing Urdu and Kashmiri and its replacement by Roman script.

The paper presents a case study of language shift in Gond Tribe. The paper is based on the concept of restricted and elaborated code by Basil Bernstein and uses the same as a frame of reference for this particular linguistic scenario under study.

Attitudes in operational terms, an individual’s attitude, according to Gardener (1985, p.9) is ‘an evaluation reaction to some referent or attitude object, inferred on the basis of the individual’s beliefs or opinions about the referent.’ Attitudes like all aspects of the development of cognition and affect in human beings develop early in childhood and are likely to be closely related to the reasons of learning. John Oller (1977,78) and his colleagues conducted several large-scale studies of the relationship between attitudes and language success. The researchers were able to identify a few meaningful clusters of attitudinal variables that correlated positively with attained proficiency. In most part of the study it yielded that positive attitudes towards self, the native language group, and the target language group enhanced proficiency. The aim of the present paper is to understand the nature and effect of attitudinal variables on the English language learning in the multilingual scenario of native speakers of Kashmiri language. English language has a considerable prestige position in every section of Kashmiri society.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir harbours many minority linguistic communities which live in iclose contact with each other. Although a minority language, Pashtu forms an important language in the linguistic landscape of the state. Being a very small minority language, it does not find any place in the educational curriculum at even the primary level. The problem gets further aggravated due to the non-availability of basic primers and books in the language. The children born in Pashtu speaking families cannot receive education in their mother tongue and, in the process, have to take recourse to English, Hindi, Urdu and Kashmiri languages. Although a good deal of research has been carried on Pashtu spoken in Afghanistan and North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan, Pashtu spoken in Indian part of Kashmir has largely been neglected. No descriptive study of the language has been carried out so far. It needs to be mentioned here that the Pashtu speakers have migrated to Kashmir some hundred years before. This formed the primary motivation for undertaking this work, where an attempt has been made to provide a thorough descriptive sketch of phonological system of the Pashtu spoken in Kashmir province of the Jammu & Kashmir state.

In this paper, we focus on analyzing genitive case in Telugu, for the purpose of developing a syntactic parser. Genitive case, treated as falling under sixth case (shashti) based on the Panini’s classification, denotes relation between two nouns, rather than between a verb and a noun. Therefore, it is also designated as aupa vibhakti ‘sub-case.’ (chinnaya Suri,1855) Although genitive is most often associated with possession, it is found to be performing a number of other functions as well. In this paper, we attempt to examine in detail the form and the various functions performed by genitive case in Telugu with a view to provide a rule-based system for machine learning purpose. The data is analyzed based on the Paninian Dependency Model. Paninian Dependency Model is considered the best model to analyse morphologically complex Indian languages.

In the twentieth century, treating art as an expression of human consciousness proved a myth as questions were raised about the very possibility of the expression of human consciousness. The assumption gave birth to a new trend termed as absurdism or the literature of silence. Art was no longer understood as the consciousness expressing itself. In fact, language turned out to be a trap for the artist, forcing him to take recourse in the medium of silence. However, such a transition has turned out to be the latest enigma in the human consciousness, throwing up its own set of challenges.

This paper reveals that a conjunct verb is formed by putting together either a noun or an adjective and a verb (as light verb) in Meiteilon. The formation of a reduced form of noun and verb is quite interesting in conjunct verb construction in Meiteilon. Such reduced form of noun (reduced form of noun) and verb sequence brings out an area of research for analyzing nominal elements with different values other than just sharing its semantic and syntactic features with the verb in the co-occurrence. Though it is in reduced form, this nominal can still function as a host in conjunct verb constructions in Meiteilon.

Universal Networking Language (UNL) is a computer language created to represent and process information across language barriers (Uchida et al, 2001). The two basic tools in the UNL system are Enconverter and Deconverter. Enconverter is a language independent parser that converts NL sentence into UNL and Deconverter is a language independent generator that can convert UNL expression to a variety of languages, using respective language’s Grammatical rules and Dictionary. The present work is an attempt to use UNL for the purpose of MT. The paper presents the Analysis rules and Dictionary for some structures of Kashmiri. The derived UNLised text can be deconverted to any language by the Deconverter tool. The usefulness of Interlingua- based MT system over other MT systems has also been discussed in this paper.

The paper discusses the comparative Bengali and Odia morphological analysis of reduplication. While dealing with the procedure, two categorizations are made for both the languages under the broad heading of Complete Reduplication and Partial Reduplication. The categorizations include ‘Lexeme-based’ and ‘Onomatopoetic-based’ echo word formation. The paper also investigates the process of reduplication where the words are formed based on phonetic imitations of naturally occurring phenomenon which have no semantic value when they stand alone. Furthermore, as an inference of the study, the paper presents an entire list of linguistic similarities and contrasts between the two languages taking only reduplication patterns into consideration.

Stylistic analysis aims at outlining certain stylistic features of a text which are important in characterizing the text as well as the writer of the text. These style features are features at linguistic and non-linguistic levels which are used by a writer in a text for a particular end in his mind. This paper is an attempt to give a stylistic account of the poetry of Shamas Faqir who is a popular Kashmiri Sufi poet of nineteenth century. Shamas Faqir’s poetry provides rich insights about the linguistic and non-linguistic nuances of Kashmiri language and Kashmiri literature. This poetry can serve as a subject of innovative research field for Kashmiri linguistics and literary studies.

In India at least 197 languages are surviving at various levels of endangerment. Chinali is one such language, predominantly spoken as mother tongue by not more than 700 speakers in Himachal Pradesh. This language is surviving a moribund stage of endangerment which implies that its transmission to younger generations has completely stopped. This paper aims at describing various causes and reasons of its endangerment and will suggest some measures and methods by which this language can be preserved and protected.

English, have assumed vital significance. In recent years, English language teaching in a developing country, like India, has taken a new dimension. Communicative Language Teaching is highly advocated by many applied linguists and English language teachers as an effective language teaching approach. It is also believed that we learn language most effectively by using it in realistic situations, so communicative syllabi aims at developing student’s ability to use the target language through activities which actually stimulate target performance (Nunan 1989:13). Though English is taught to the Kashmiri students at the higher secondary level but the content of General English usually lacks in the communicative component necessary to acquire requisite skills in effective use of language for communication. Thus realizing the importance of communicative skills in English, Functional English has been introduced as one of the subjects in secondary school and college curriculum in Kashmir. It should not be mistaken that Functional English is a separate subject but it is basically a communicative approach to teaching and learning of English which focuses on realistic topics, relevant to real life situations. The present study is based on the following assumption that those students who opt for Functional English course develop greater proficiency in English. In this backdrop a study was carried out in the higher secondary schools of Srinagar with an aim to test the proficiency of General English and Functional English students. The sample for this study was taken from various higher secondary institutes of Srinagar city. This paper attempts to explore the significant difference in the results of General English students and Functional English students with the help of t-test. The findings showed that Functional English students perform better at both levels and there is significant difference from initial to final level of writing, reading, listening and speaking. The results also reveal the fact that Functional English course helps the students to achieve proficiency in English language to a greater extent.

This paper offers an analysis of the converbs in Baram. Baram has sequential, simultaneous, and progressive converbs. The sequential converb, also known as conjunctive participle -iŋ, is also homophonous with the progressive marker, and has multiple syntactic-semantic functions in Baram. The suffix appears not only as typical ‘sequential actions’ but also serves other syntactic functions in clause combining, such as temporal, reason, concessive, perfective, among others. Similarly, Baram employs the simultaneous converb, -la, and progressive converb -cəi. They are used to conjoin the simultaneous and progressive actions to that of the main clauses.

This paper explores the issue of neuralization of aspiration feature in voiced stops of Kashmiri language. This has been done with response to different constraints and their interaction with one another.

This article investigates aspects of critical reading in two countries. Questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were used as instruments amongst the research population which consisted of 160 students from Indian and Malaysian ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms. The results suggest that more students from India as compared to Malaysia prefer to select their own reading material. The majority of the respondents in both countries attach great value to critical thinking while reading. According to the respondents, a critical thinker/reader should be curious, logical, self-critical and have the ability to identify problems and their solutions and distinguish between facts and opinions. A significant number are of the view that their teachers do embed critical thinking in different activities; however, a large number were not convinced by the teachers’ assessment of critical thinking. In the Indian context, there appears to be more emphasis on creative expression in post-reading tasks as compared to the Malaysian context.

This paper gives a brief phonological description of Kohistani. Kohistani of swat has been already described by Grierson (1919) and Hallberg (1992) to a large extent but the Kohistani spoken in the valley of Kashmir is yet to be taken into consideration. The Kohistani spoken in the valley in different areas of Kangan like Waniyarm Wangath, Mirpati mamar and Ganivan of District Ganderbal (Jammu & Kashmir). This paper is an attempt to provide the phonological description of Kohistani and gives a brief description of a few phonological processes of the said language spoken in Jammu and Kashmir.

There is an increasing awareness/agreement that a bottom-up approach to the study of TAM categories may be preferred. The present write-up lists modals employed in Kashmiri. Modals, strong or weak, tend to merge with the future tense. Kashmiri employs morphemes suffixed to the verb form to reflect tense-pr., pst., fut. and aspect-perf., imperf. The modality is expressed by such like core modals as paz-un ‘should’, hekun ‘can/could/probablity’, tagun ‘can/ability’, and several semi-modals (verb forms) like vaatun’reach’, pyon ‘fall’, aasun ’to be’ and the negative particle maa ‘not’. The MODALS reflect obligation, necessity, possibility, probability, and speculation whereas the auxiliary aasun ‘to be’ in its present and past tense forms reflects speaker’s definite knowledge that something is real or true as the case may be.

The study presents a detailed description of pronominals in Gurezi Shina. The paper is a first descriptive study of Gurezi pronouns. Four types of pronouns have been presented; personal, demonstrative, reflexive and interrogative. Detailed paradigms have been presented to show the variation in pronouns along the grammatical categories of person, number and gender. Furthermore pronouns in Gurezi take case inflections like regular nouns and these have been shown in detailed paradigms. The nature of the paper is descriptive-analytic. The paper presents a part of the findings of a major study undertaken for the documentation and description of Gurezi Shina1. The data for the study has been collected from native Shina speakers during 2011 and 2012 during various field trips to Gurez valley.

The phenomenon called ‘Reversed compound-verbs’ (RVCs hereafter) has very much been noticed by Hook (1974; 55). He highlights the ‘confusions’ that such RCVs bring for the analysis of this category of compound verbs in Hindi. He has been able to list some of the pairs of ‘polar’ and ‘vector’ verbs that can be reordered in Hindi and many other Indian languages, but there is no explanation that is available for such reordering in Hook(ibid). The present paper is an effort to examine the process of the formation of these ‘Reversible Compound Verbs’ (RCVs hereafter) and analyze the function of the RCVs by using the yardstick adopted in Das (2006, 2013 and 2015). It would be interesting to examine what happens to the morphological, semantic and syntactic requirements of the CVs when they are compared with that of the RCVs. What is the semantic context in which the reordering of some CVs is grammatical and acceptable but others turn out to be ungrammatical and thus not allowed for reversing or reordering. It would give us a chance to evaluate the hypothesis proposed in Das (1997, 2015) that the ± transitivity of the V2 decides the ± transitivityof the entire CV in Hindi and other languages3. There aresome linguistic principles that dominate when and howCVs can be reversed. It is interesting to examine the so-called ‘reversed compound verbs’ in Hindi as it involves the pragmatic factors such as stylistic effect, suddenness, directionality, intentionality and the uncontrollable actions as the linguistic parameters which need a great deal of explanation. The present paper in an effort to take up these issues that are involved in reversing, reshuffling or reordering of the ‘compound verbs’ in Hindi and this should be empirically explained and typologically verified in other Indian languages.

This paper describes, in an analytical approach, of negation in Kashmiri and attempts to describe various logistic mechanisms that are used for negation in Kashmiri Language. This paper gives an account of forms and position of the negative as well its occurrence in different types of sentence structures.

This paper aims at providing a description of the distribution of negation particles in Saudi Northern Region Dialect of Arabic (SNRDA). The SNRDA data discussed here, compared tonegation particlesin Classical Arabic (CA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA),show that there are only two negative particles used in this dialect laa and maa. The former is mainly used with the imperative while the latter is used with other types of sentences; and in certain cases, thetwo negative particlesare used interchangeably without any change in sentence meaning. Moreover, variants of these negative particles like lu, li, mu and mi are created through a vowel harmony process that takes place between the long vowel of the negative particle laa or maaand the vowel of the pronoun follows it. The paper contribution lies in the fact that it deals with data of a dialect that to my knowledge is rarely investigated or described and it adds to our understanding of nature of the syntactic element “negation”.