Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

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

Information and communication technology plays a vital role in every aspect of human life. Technology has become a great source for motivating the learners towards learning. It makes the learners creative and innovative. It influences every aspect of education from teaching- learning to assessment and evaluation. Using ICT in the field of education, the teaching methods have become learner-centered. The tools under ICT provide the students new ways of reading and writing which enhance English language teaching and learning. This paper explores several benefits of implementing ICT in the classroom. It also studies the impacts of ICT in motivating learners in learning English.

Greeting is act of communication in which individuals purposefully make their vicinity known to others, to show regard for, and to propose a kind of relationship or social status (formal or casual) between people or group of peoples interacting with one another. This paper brings forth the greeting manners of Gujjars of Fakir Gujari village. It is an area on the outskirts of Srinagar, which rests in the lap of Mahadev hillock and their colony is spread over 50-60 sq kms. The present paper briefly discusses different types of greetings with varied situations in which a greeter uses various greeting forms appropriate to particular context. The study is based on observation and interviews, attempts the greeting patterns. The objective of this paper is to highlight some interesting inherent linguistic features in day-today social interaction of Gojri Speakers.

This paper presents the overall view on Institutional Ethics Review Committees and illustrates whether it is bridge or barrier to human research

The language use and its appropriation has been the leitmotif of postcolonial writings to write back to “canon”. The present paper is an attempt to highlight these strategies of appropriations in the local newspapers. The paper will try to analyse the reconstruction of the language apparatuses of the colonial order to accommodate the indigenous languages. Furthermore, the paper attempts to justify the postcolonial praxis of mixing, glossing and bringing cultural variations in local newspapers.

The special language features of headlines are used in order to make newspaper articles more attractive and striking. The headlines have the important function of grabbing the readers’ attention and giving them an idea of the news story’s content and tone, so that they can decide whether it is worth reading or not. The focus of the paper is on headlines and their grammatical characteristics, and the rhetorical strategies used to create them in print and online news, with many examples provided, but the main characteristics of leads and body copy are also examined.

Ergativity is a term that refers to a certain pattern that some languages show in treating arguments of a verb. Thus ergativity can be explained in terms of marking of verb and its arguments in a clause. This paper aims at analyzing Pahari language as an ergative language by using Keenan’s standard mechanisms of case marking, verb agreement and word order. The results show evidence of both nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive structures in Pahari. This implies that, like other regional languages, Pahari also exhibits split ergativity. In Pahari language, ergativity appears with perfective aspect.

One of the most important social customs in any human society is greeting. Different greeting expressions are within the vernacular of any community and have a significant social function due to their role in enhancing and promoting the relations between the society members. Variety of greeting expressions, both verbal and non-verbal are found in the speech of Kashmiri speakers. A strong ‘verbal lubricant’ in its own right provides a bridge between individuals, and greeting expressions is one among those strategies which fills that gap and establishes the bond between different interlocutors. The present paper is an endeavour to study the detailed usage of greeting expressions along with the statistical measurements, found among the Kashmiri speakers.

The present work is an attempt to study the communication skills of the undergraduate students studying in the different colleges of the Srinagar City. The main objective aim of this paper is to assess the level of proficiency of speaking among the undergraduate students. The participants in this study were 148 undergraduate students taken from five different colleges of Srinagar. They were interviewed by a structured questionnaire. A questionnaire eliciting demographic data was also administered to the students. The results revealed that the communication skills of the students were marginal. They are not able to speak competently in real life situations. Their mean score on the 9 band scale (adopted from ‘The International English Language Testing System’) was 4.

This paper presents a socio-linguistic perspective on the languages that are used in a university. Verbal interaction of students with each other varies drastically within the classroom and outside. The usage also changes with time and peer group. The primary intent of the paper was to find out the factors that motivate the students to change the language of use. The data were collected from two central universities located in Delhi: Jamia MIllia Islamia and University of Delhi. The data were analyzed qualitatively. The data reveals that there is a non-conducive culture of language policy in academic spaces that has its roots in social inequality. Given these circumstances the young adults segregate and classify the places to use different languages. This must be seen as a commentary on the requirement of language, a social capital tool, in gaining (or losing) social capital within the places of higher education.

The Chenab valley of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is considered as the most divergent area in terms of linguistic features as the area has accommodated a good number of tribes and each tribe has its unique identity based on the language they are speaking. These communities comprise of Bhaderwahi, Paddari, Gaddi, Sirazi etc., living in districts Doda and Kishtawar of Jammu and Kashmir. These communities share some common cultural and linguistic features. But still there are some variations which make them different from each other in terms of language and culture. The present paper is an attempt to study one of the linguistic aspects that is phonological comparison between two languages, Bhaderwahi and Paddari. In this paper the researchers have given the phonological description of both languages and described phonological similarities and differences between two languages.

The paper explores the category of Conjunct Verbs in the verb-final Tibeto-Burman language, Tinkarlo, spoken by the Tinkari community both in India (Dharchula, Uttarakhand) and Nepal. The striking presence of code-mixed or bilingual conjunct verbs makes it interesting to study how the nominal or the adjectival ‘host’ is borrowed from other languages (used in the region, being a trading hub) while the light verb is from Tinkarlo. The paper, which is the result of a 10-day field trip, also tries to suggest as an allied objective whether certain abstract notions are absent in the Tinkari inventory or have been replaced by expressions from other languages (like Hindi) predominant in the valley.

Gojri is a central Indo Aryan language. It is spoken by Gujjars who are dwellers of Northern Pakistan, Afganistan and Jammu and Kashmir. In Jammu and Kashmir, Gujjars are spread over many areas of Poonch, Rajouri, Banihal, Fakir Gojri. The present study is an attempt to analyse the phonology and noun morphology of Gojri spoken in Fakir Gojri area of Srinagar applying the descriptive principles and techniques. The data for the current study was collected during July-Aug 2019 from native speakers of Gojri. After analyzing data, it was revealed that Gojri has 41 phonemes; 30 consonants and 11 vowels. It is an inflectional language and basic words take up different morphemes to realize number, gender and case.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most acclaimed and original sociologists of the twentieth century, developed an elaborate theory of language in his seminal works such as Lanuage and Symbolic Power (1991), Practical Reason (1998) in which he, transcending the formalism of Ferdinand de Saussure, brought out the dynamic nature of language in praxis. Trained in a wide range of disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, political theory and anthropology, Bourdieu argues that it is in praxis that language is born, produced and reproduced. For him, language is, therefore, to be understood and defined in praxis rather than in abstract theory that excludes the socio-political and economic factors requisite for its production, reproduction and survival. The dual objective of this paper is: a) to discuss Bourdieu’s critique of formal of linguistics and b) to offer his view of language in praxis.

The paper reports the results of a comparative acoustic analysis of vowels in Kashmiri and Urdu language spoken by native Kashmiri speakers. The study involved a comparison of formant frequencies and duration of six vowels of Kashmiri and Urdu spoken by native Kashmiris. Forty native Kashmiri speakers, with twenty of them having Urdu as their second language contributed to the study. For all the six vowels in each language, average values for F1 were plotted against F2 values separately and then comparatively across the two languages. The results obtained have been tabulated and comparative graphs have been plotted to show the significant differences between vowels in the two languages. The data has been analyzed with PRAAT. Gold Wave software has been used for sound editing. Based on formant values of different vowels in the two languages, vowel spaces for the two languages have also been developed.

Rule-based tagging systems have been developed for different languages such as EngCG tagger for English (Voutilainen 1995, 1999), a tagger for Telugu by Badugu (2014), a tagger for Hindi by Singh et al (2006), a tagger for Turkish by Daybelge and Cicekli (2007), a tagger for Icelandic by Loftsson (2008), a tagger for Pashto by Rabbi et al (2009), a tagger for Arabic by Al-Taani and Al-Rub (2009), a tagger for Hindi by Garg et al (2012), a tagger for Bahasa Indonesia by Rashel et al (2014), a tagger for Marathi by Bagul et al (2014). Most of these systems use syntactic rules, morphological markers and lexicons to identify Part-of-Speech in the corresponding languages. The present paper attempts to identify the closed-class lexical items and lexical items with morphological markers in Kashmiri which can play a crucial role in any rule-based tagging system that may be designed to identity Part-of-Speech (POS) in Kashmiri corpora.

Postcolonial translation is instrumental in the formulation of culture, identity and the regrowth of regional literature. It plays a significant role in reclaiming the past and resisting the dominant languages and literatures. The cross cultural interaction among the different social groups results in constructing and redefining the marginalized identities. For example, in India the misrepresentation of Indian culture by the British and the lost identity of various religious groups like Hindus and Muslims are being mostly regained through translation. In this context, the understanding of various aspects of the dynamics of translation is essential for the current discourse in postcolonial translation. Moreover, the different dimensions of translation like translation as a creative process, issues related to target audience, readership, application of different strategies, various approaches and theories, issues related to publishing have made the translation process a challenging task in the postcolonial times. This paper aims to highlight the current trends in the postcolonial translations with reference to some short story collections from Urdu and Kashmiri translated into English. It explores some of the prominent features of postcolonial translation. The focus is to explore the various strategies which are in vogue in these translations.

Languages reflect resolutions of conflict between competing demands or constraints. A constraint is a structural requirement which may be either violated or satisfied by an output form. The optimal surface forms of a language are possible because it undergoes constraint conflicts, the forms which are least violated in the process emerges as winners and become optimal surface structures in a language. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the Pashto language in the framework of OT (Optimality Theory), this will include different Markedness and Faithfulness family constraint interaction in order to choose the most optimal candidates. This study will present the factorial typology ranking of different constraints out of the universal constraint inventories provided by different scholars (Hammond 1994, Price, Smolensky 1993, Kager 1999). This study will also adopt the methodology of Rene Kager provided by him in his book ‘The Optimality Theory’ (1999).

There are innumerous research works that have been carried out in the area of de-lexicalization, so much so that it has almost been renamed as ‘grammaticalization’ and it now serves as one of core areas of morphological and syntactic analysis of languages. However, not much has been reported about the contexts of de-lexicalization and the degree of de-lexicalization. The context highlights the linguistic need of justifying as to why the ontology of lexical item has to be either denied or taken away. The degree of de-lexicalization on the other hand talk about the stages of grammaticalization and it is often very interesting to see that though the distinction between de-lexicalization and grammaticalization is not maintained anymore, may be that there are certain contexts where these two mark different linguistic features on the lexical items and we may still need some room for their different usages.

This paper employs narrative discourse analysis to analyze Manto's short story "Toba Tek Singh" by using two narrative analysis frameworks that focus on the macrostructure (Stein, 1982) and microstructure (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) aspects of the story. The analysis covers the story's purpose, generic structure, and lexico-grammatical cohesion. Findings show that Manto follows a series of structural moves and uses a variety of narrative strategies (e.g. high level of involvement and a wide range of lexical and grammatical cohesive ties) which contribute to the creation of a well-formed text that has effectively achieved its purpose and made its intended effect. This paper argues that there are many ways in which this macro- and microstructure analysis of the story may be exploited in the language classroom.

This is a study of Korean and Hindi stop consonants p, t, k in terms of VOT (Voice Onset Time) duration and VLT (Voice Lead Time). VOT durations were measured from word-initial and word-medial stop consonants from native speakers of Hindi, and Korean. In order to draw inferences for SLA (Second Language Acquisition) and pedagogical implications similar data is also recorded from five native speakers of Hindi who were learning Korean as a second language. So, three data sets, viz. L1 Hindi, L2 Korean, and L1 Korean are used.