‘Book Review: Seino van Breugel. A Grammar of Atong (Brill’s Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages 5). Leiden: Brill, 2014, 660 pp., ISBN 9789004258921. €231,00 (Hb)’, Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, 3 (2): 231-232. (original) (raw)

Introduction: Languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area – Grammatical Sketches

The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area, 2019

Thomason and Kaufman’s 1988 book Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics had a stimulating effect on the fields of comparative and descriptive linguistics and inspired a number of studies on various topics related to language contact: the relationship between typology and language contact; the effect of language contact on a language’s genetically inherited characteristics, and work on mixed and endangered languages. More generally speaking, the increased availability of data relating to language contact has enabled widerranging discussion on the nature of language contact and its consequences (see Hickey 2010 for a more detailed account of these subjects). Within this landscape, our book lies at the crossroads of the following themes: (1) vulnerable and endangered languages, since some of the languages described here are minority languages losing ground under the linguistic influence of dominant neighbouring languages (see chapters on Cham, Wa); (2) areal typology, ...

Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages: A Principled Typology

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2003

In this volume, we report new scholarship on fourteen South Asian languages, from four different language families, in a specific domain: the grammar of anaphora. This work was carried out and is represented here in terms of a unified framework that was designed to achieve cross-linguistic comparability. It was informed by one guiding principle: the convergence of two lines of investigation that are often kept distinct in linguistic inquiry today: linguistic theory, in a generative grammar framework, and linguistic typology. The former is focused on searching for explanations of the principles and parameters that underlie the cognitive competence for natural language and that are hypothesized to provide a "Universal Grammar" (UG), or underlying architecture, for all natural languages and for their learnability. The second line of investigation attempts to capture the "true facts" of cross-linguistic variation in the universal array of existent natural languages (cf. Comrie 1981). In our view, fruitful development of the science of linguistics depends on this integration (see, e.g., Subbarao-Saxena 1987a, 1987b; Subbarao 1998). That is, it requires a lively interchange between theory construction and the empirical challenge presented to it by the detailed investigation, in a principled manner, of the phenomena found in a wide variety of actual human languages. Without basic theory, the fundamental questions of the nature of the human competence for language cannot be addressed. However, in the absence of real language data, proposed answers may not be relevant to the real questions. The South Asian area is a particularly rich domain for this specific area of linguistic inquiry, as well as others. It includes several major families, of which four are represented by languages in this volume. In some cases, members of a single family are widely separated and in contact with members of others, resulting in various degrees of convergence. The existence of a South Asian linguistic area has been recognized for some time, beginning particularly with the pioneering work of Suniti Kumar Chatterji (1926, 1953), Jules Bloch (1934), and Murray Emeneau (1956), and work in that domain has been continued by other scholars (see, for example, Masica 1976, 1991 and the general account in Shapiro-Schiffman 1981). At the same time, there are significant differences and subareas, as the works in this volume clearly attest. South Asia thus represents a natural laboratory for the investigation of phenomena such as those

Grammaticalization processes in the languages of South Asia

This chapter describes grammaticalization patterns in a broad selection of languages of South Asia, a multilingual region of the world known to constitute a linguistic area in which unrelated languages demonstrate evidence of linguistic convergence. In addition to presenting representative examples of grammaticalization, the chapter specifically considers whether widely recurring patterns in unrelated languages could be induced by language contact. The investigation finds robust evidence for the transfer of seemingly identical cognitive schemas across the genetic boundaries of languages in contact. These target morphemes or constructions with identical meanings in unrelated languages, and they produce grammaticalization outcomes that are not attested in related languages located outside of South Asia. Such replicated patterns must cater to a multilingual community’s communicative needs, while at the same time reducing the cognitive burden imposed by multilingualism in a linguistic area.

Review of Language in South Asia by Robert D. Angus in California Linguistic Notes

This volume of 26 articles provides a wealth of information about language on the Indian Subcontinent, one of the densest and most complex language areas in the world, within whose seven political divisions are spoken varieties representing Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and the Munda subdivision of the Astro-Asiatic taxon, along with several contact languages, by one and a half billion people, about 25% of the world population, in a great ancient Sprachbund. The sheer linguistic variability of the region is staggering. The 1961 census counted the Mother Tongues of India at more than 1,600, although R.E. Asher ("Language in Historical Context," 31 -48) puts the number of languages at closer to 300. The usual difficulties of classification apply, given that in many cases a language name is a cover term for a set of varieties. South Asia's reputation as a Sprachbund, first suggested by Murray Emeneau in 1956 (India as a Linguistic Area in Language and Linguistic Areas: Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press,1980), is well justified, as over several millennia major and minor representatives of the aforementioned language taxa have coexisted, diffused, and converged. K.V. Subbarao, in "Typological Characteristics of South Asian Languages" (49 -78) makes a survey of typological features shared by important representatives of the languages in South Asia,