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Books by Somdev Kar

"Syllable Structure of Bangla: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach is a three part study designed to... more "Syllable Structure of Bangla: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach is a three part study designed to provide the student/readers with a better understanding about the structure of Bangla syllables in terms of phonology and morphology. The book is divided into twelve chapters with each chapter focusing on one particular area of the study.

The first part of this three part study focuses on the frequency of occurrences of different consonant clusters in Bangla. It argues that these clusters are best described with the help of the Bangla lexicon into three strata that include native Bangla words (NB) as well as Sanskrit borrowings (SB) and the other borrowings (OB). This part of the study focuses on the analysis of these syllabic structures in Bangla with the help of the Optimality Theory (OT).

The second part of the study focuses on a morphological analysis of the standard verbal inflectional paradigms of Bangla in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). This includes categories of tense/mood, levels of politeness and persons. This analysis is then compared with the English verbal inflectional morphology. In a later stage, Kar picks up the Optimality Theory from where he left it at the first part and applies it to analyze the outcomes of the morphological analysis in DM and following phonological changes on them."

Papers by Somdev Kar

In the first part of this thesis, an extensive corpus study is used in order to determine the fre... more In the first part of this thesis, an extensive corpus study is used in order to determine the frequency of occurrences of different consonant clusters. It turns out that the clusters are best described with the help of a division of the Bangla lexicon into three strata: Sanskrit borrowings (SB), Native Bangla words (NB), and the other borrowings (OB). The NB stratum does not allow complex onsets while SB and OB allows complex onsets. Further, SB and NB do not allow complex codas, while these are found in OB. A range of other restrictions are discussed. Special attention is paid to voicing and to aspiration. An agreement analysis of voicing at the word medial position is argued for. A positional faithfulness analysis is presented for syllable final deaspiration. The analysis is presented in Optimality Theory (OT), following the stratification of the lexicon by Ito and Mester (in Japanese). In the second part of the thesis, a morphological analysis in the Distributed Morphology framew...

Well - designed and well - developed corpora can considerably be helpful in bridging the gap betw... more Well - designed and well - developed corpora can considerably be helpful in bridging the gap between theory and practice in language documentation and revitalization process, in building language technology applications, in testing language hypothesis and in numerous other important areas. Developing a corpus for an under - resourced or endangered language encounters several problems and issues. The present study starts with an over view of the role that corpora (speech corpora in particular) can play in language documentation and revitalization process. It then provides a brief account of the situation of endangered languages and corpora development efforts in India. Thereafter, it d iscusses the various issues involved in the construction of a speech corpus for low resourced languages. Insights are followed from speech database of Kanauji of Kanpur, an endangered variety of Western Hindi, spoken in Uttar Pradesh. Kanauji speech databa se is being developed at Indian Institute of T...

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2019

This study attempts to analyse the permissible syllable structures and the aspiration and voicing... more This study attempts to analyse the permissible syllable structures and the aspiration and voicing of word-initial and word-final segments in the syllable structure of Bangla. A corpus study leads to a detailed analysis of Bangla syllable structure restrictions, relative to the three traditional strata of the Bangla lexicon, namely, Native Bangla (NB, Tadbhava), Sanskrit borrowings (SB, Tatsama and Ardha-Tatsama), and other borrowings (OB, Deshi and Bideshi), following Ito and Mester’s work on the Japanese lexicon. Complex codas are allowed only in OB. Complex onsets are ruled out in NB while they have the maximal form s+C+liquid in SB and OB. There is no onset maximisation: Medial clusters in all strata avoid complex onsets if a consonant can be syllabified into the preceding coda (Vp.lV rather than V.plV). Aspiration is banned from the coda in NB but not generally in SB and OB, where restrictions that are more complex obtain. Obstruent voicing contrasts are present in onset and cod...

Journal of Universal Language, 2017

"Review of Indian English ( Pingali, Sailaja, 2009), published by the Edinburgh University P... more "Review of Indian English ( Pingali, Sailaja, 2009), published by the Edinburgh University Press. This book treats linguistic and socio-cultural aspects of English as it is used in India. It is an important contribution to the Edinburgh University Press series 'Dialects of English', which documents varieties of English worldwide. In India's multilingual setting, English plays a significant role in communication, literature, business and elsewhere. Though English first came to India with the British, in the last four hundred years it has become an indispensable part of Indian society. This volume contextualizes research on Indian English by using a good selection of sample texts, from conversational to literary. The book is organized into seven interesting, well-illustrated chapters, discussing phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, lexis, discourse and other issues related to English used in India. It also contains a survey of previous research and an annotated bibliography on Indian English. "

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;am... more &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Syllable Structure of Bangla: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach is a three part study designed to provide the student/readers with a better understanding about the structure of Bangla syllables in terms of phonology and morphology. The book is divided into twelve chapters with each chapter focusing on one particular area of the study. The first part of this three part study focuses on the frequency of occurrences of different consonant clusters in Bangla. It argues that these clusters are best described with the help of the Bangla lexicon into three strata that include native Bangla words (NB) as well as Sanskrit borrowings (SB) and the other borrowings (OB). This part of the study focuses on the analysis of these syllabic structures in Bangla with the help of the Optimality Theory (OT). The second part of the study focuses on a morphological analysis of the standard verbal inflectional paradigms of Bangla in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). This includes categories of tense/mood, levels of politeness and persons. This analysis is then compared with the English verbal inflectional morphology. In a later stage, Kar picks up the Optimality Theory from where he left it at the first part and applies it to analyze the outcomes of the morphological analysis in DM and following phonological changes on them.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;

Language Sciences, 2013

Abstract This paper intends to illustrate an analysis of the treatment of the complex onsets at t... more Abstract This paper intends to illustrate an analysis of the treatment of the complex onsets at the word-initial position in some regional varieties of Bangla or Bengali in the framework of Optimality Theory ( McCarthy and Prince, 1993a , McCarthy and Prince, 1993b , Prince and McCarthy, 1996 , Prince and Smolensky, 1993 ). In a stratified lexicon system, borrowed words belong to SB (Sanskrit Borrowings) and OB (Other Borrowings) strata. NB (Native Bangla) does not allow any complex onset at the word-initial position. The borrowed words (SB and OB) with complex onset are retained intact in the standard colloquial Bangla (SCB). But, some non-standard regional varieties (NSCB), which are spoken in many parts of West Bengal and Bangladesh, register vowel-insertions in several SB and OB words with word-initial consonant cluster. In most likely cases, the tendency is to break the word-initial cluster by inserting a vowel in between the consonants in the cluster. An Optimality-Theoretic (OT) analysis of this phenomenon is offered in this article with the help of a stratification strategy for the Bangla lexicon.

Acta Linguistica Asiatica, 2016

Hindi, in its totality, refers to a dialect continuum spoken mainly across northern India. This ... more Hindi, in its totality, refers to a dialect continuum spoken mainly across northern India. This continuum is usually divided into two forms: Eastern and Western Hindi. Eastern Hindi is mainly made up of Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi and Bagheli dialects, while Western Hindi consists of Hindostani, Banagru, Braj Bhaka, Bundeli and Kanauji dialects.After Linguistic survey of India (1894-1928) by George A. Grierson – there has been little or no work which specifically focuses on Kanauji. Trivedi (1993, 2005) and Mishra and Bali (2010, 2011) report some secondary data from Kanauji in their works, their focus of inquiry is not Kanauji though. Lewis, Simons & Fennig (2013) refers Kanauji as a language with very low identity.This paper attempts to study the current sociolinguistic situation of Kanauji spoken in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh (India). Some other goals of the paper are following: 1) to feel the pulse of language attitude, with reference to standard Hindi, of the people in Ka...

Reduplication is a common morphological process in many languages, particularly in South Asia. Th... more Reduplication is a common morphological process in many languages, particularly in South Asia. This study focuses on the reduplication phenomenon in Hadoti, where it ensues with the help of a discourse marker /rə/, functioning as an emphasizing agent in the process. This marker comes between the base and the reduplicant for expressing emphasis in work or action or verb (as in /kha rə kha/ ‘do eat,’ etc.). In Hadoti, /rə/ functions as a vocative case marker when it comes at the end of the sentence as in /ram ɡjo rə/ ‘Ram went’. However, when /rə/ occurs in between the base and the reduplicant, the stress shifts on the latter from the base. Phenomena of reduplication with a specific focus on the use of /rə/ are discussed in the current study using the constraints like *CLASH, and STRESS-TO-RED, etc. This particular phenomenon is predominantly present in the case of verbs in Hadoti, which is a unique feature of this variety of Hindi.

Advances in Hindi Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2018

The prosodic features like sonority motivate the pattern of reduplication in Hadoti. This regiona... more The prosodic features like sonority motivate the pattern of reduplication in Hadoti. This regional variety of the Rajasthani language is spoken in the Western part of India (Rajasthan). Its reduplication process is highly productive, both morphologically

Well-designed and well-developed corpora can considerably be helpful in bridging the gap between ... more Well-designed and well-developed corpora can considerably be helpful in bridging the gap between theory and practice in language documentation and revitalization process, in building language technology applications, in testing language hypothesis and in numerous other important areas. Developing a corpus for an under-resourced or endangered language encounters several problems and issues. The present study starts with an overview of the role that corpora (speech corpora in particular) can play in language documentation and revitalization process. It then provides a brief account of the situation of endangered languages and corpora development efforts in India. Thereafter, it discusses the various issues involved in the construction of a speech corpus for low resourced languages. Insights are followed from speech database of Kanauji of Kanpur, an endangered variety of Western Hindi, spoken in Uttar Pradesh. Kanauji speech database is being developed DOCUMENTACIÓN DE OBSERVACIONES SOBRE LENGUAS HINDIS DE POCOS RECURSOS A PARTIR DE UN CORPUS ORAL DE KANAUJI Resumen Los corpus bien diseñados y bien desarrollados pueden ser considerablemente útiles para salvar la brecha entre la teoría y la práctica en la documentación de la lengua y los procesos de revitalización, en la *

International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 2017

The present work discusses about factors responsible for language endangerment with a specific fo... more The present work discusses about factors responsible for language endangerment with a specific focus on Hadoti, an indigenous regional varieties (RV) of Rajasthan, spoken by communities present mainly near the Kota region and neighboring state of Madhya Pradesh. Hadoti along with Jaipuri has been attested as one of the RVs of Rajasthani language that belongs to the Central-Eastern Rajasthani. This study tries to determine the role of Hadoti speakers in both language loss and language revitalization apart from the other reasons for the slow death of the variety. Further, it attempts to provide some possible solutions to mitigate the problem of loss of culture every time a language dies.

Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 2019

Journal of Universal Language, 2017

Language Sciences, 2013

Acta Linguistica Asiatica, 2016

Advances in Hindi Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, 2018

International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics, 2017

Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT) was developed as a response to a “conceptual crisis at the cen... more Optimality Theory (henceforth, OT) was developed as a response to a “conceptual crisis at the center of phonological thought” (Prince & Smolensky, 1993) concerning the role of output constraints. OT is often seen as an alternative to the rule-based approach to the phonological processes. The emergence of OT was, though partly, inspired by the concepts of neural networks, as we can see the ideas of optimization, parallel evaluation, and competition (Zuraw 1995). In OT, constraints are strictly ranked and absolutely violable. These constraints are minimally violated by a set of candidates (potential surface forms of the input) and the one which incurs the least serious violations wins as the optimal candidate (Kar, 2009). Here, we will try to analyse some regular phonological events, such as epenthesis, gemination etc., in the framework of OT and with special attention to Bangla.

How does grammar and spell-checking help you while using a text editor? Did you ever use a machin... more How does grammar and spell-checking help you while using a text editor? Did you ever use a machine translation system… effectively or somehow? We all taste the fruits of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research in many ways and every day.

NLP is an emerging area of research in the recent time, though its history dates back to 1950s. The human language as a complex system of communication possesses enormous possibility and change towards the computer-savvy world. Computer Scientists and Engineers are working with Linguists, Psychologists and cognitive Scientists to give solutions to various issues related to the natural language and trying to give “computers” the linguistic ability to humans.

This talk aims at the introduction to some basics of NLP as well as computational linguistics. We shall discuss the dominant areas of NLP worldwide and in our country. We look into the success and possibilities of collaborative efforts where technologists and linguists contribute to the expansion of NLP.

The constraint based stratification in the Optimality Theoretic (OT) framework is the basis of th... more The constraint based stratification in the Optimality Theoretic (OT) framework is the basis of the phonological analysis in many languages. Bangla shows such a diverse scenario in its phonological characteristics while some others are dependent on the stratum where it belongs. The inflectional forms of a particular root lead to various sound change mechanisms in a language. In case of Bangla, it shows a variety of stratum specific operations and different and systematic inflectional forms as well. In this study, a twofold approach to the syllable structure of Bangla is discussed in OT framework. First, the Bangla lexicon is stratified according to the origin of words and then optimality theoretic analysis is applied in the strata according to their respective constraint hierarchy. In the second part, a morphological analysis in the distributed morphology framework is provided for verbal inflections of selected roots from standard Bangla. Finally, some of the questions raised by the morphological analysis are again testified in the optimality theoretic framework. Here, we mainly concentrate in the first part of the study.
An extensive corpus study is used in this work in order to determine the frequency of occurrences for a certain sound or cluster of sounds. The findings are basically applied in the optimality theoretic analysis. In general, some of the well known phonological operations, such as gemination, vowel deletion, certain sound-restrictions etc are attempted to be analyzed in the framework of optimality theory and distributed morphology.

Abstract This paper presents an overview of the phonology and sociolinguistic situation of Kanauj... more Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the phonology and sociolinguistic situation of Kanauji as it is spoken in Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh. Kanauji is spoken by more than six million people across seven districts, i.e., Auraiya, Etawah, Farrukhabad, Hardoi, Kanpur, Mainpuri, Pilibhit and Shahjahanpur, of Uttar Pradesh, India in various forms. It falls within EDGIS 6b (see Ethnologue 2013) and therefore deserves immediate reinvigoration policies. Among these verities, Kanauji of Kanpur presents very interesting case in various linguistic levels due to heavy confluence of other languages/dialects such as Standard Hindi, English, Awadhi, Braj, Bhojpuri, etc. (Chaturvedi 2015).
Till date no extensive work on Kanauji has been reported after Linguistic survey of India (1894-1928) conducted by George A. Grierson. However, some scholars while working on different languages and across different disciplines have used examples from Kanauji as supplementary materials (see Trivedi 1993, 2005; Mishra and Bali 2010, 2011).
Apart from throwing insights into the current sociolinguistic situation, this work describes basic phonemic inventory, consonants clusters, diphthongs, syllable structure and some phonological processes such as epenthesis, deletion and reduplication in Kanauji.
The study is a result of twenty days of fieldwork in some rural and urban areas of Kanpur Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh and subsequent preparation of a small speech database of Kanauji. This database (speech and text) consists of basic word lists, basic sentences, free discourse, stories, folktales, interviews, etc. elicited by a range of native speakers (both male and female) belonging to diverse age groups, educational backgrounds and professions.
Although the paper specifically focuses on Kanauji spoken in Kanpur, it is assumed that it also represents other forms of Kanauji till some extent. Wherever it is required, suitable examples from Standard Hindi and other Indian languages are given to make the paper more explanatory and more descriptive in nature.

Keywords: Endangered Languages, Kanauji, Kanpuria Hindi, Western Hindi, Indian Languages, Phonology