Variation in South Asian Languages: From Macro to Micro-Differences

Description:
The book addresses some raging questions in linguistics today: What kind of variation do typologically related languages display? Do we expect to find the same variation in genealogically unrelated languages spoken in the same area? What makes dialects different? The current book answers these questions using data from languages spoken in the Indian subcontinent―an area known for its linguistic richness and diversity. Each chapter in the book presents a wealth of data collected through extensive fieldwork or controlled experimental setups. The chapters examine macro-variation in relative clauses, word order and negation found among Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages. It also investigates meso-level variation among related Eastern Indo-Aryan languages and intra-language and dialectal changes. It encourages scholars to probe deep into the mechanisms that underlie the immense intra- and inter-language variation in the area. It serves as a resource book for postgraduate and research scholars of linguistic typology, theoretical syntax, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and for scholars interested in South Asian languages.

Contents
1 Introducing Language Variation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Pritha Chandra
2 A Panorama of South Asian Relatives: A Case of Structural
Convergence, Divergence, Innovation and Syntactic Change. . . . . . 17
Karumuri V. Subbarao
3 Negation in Select South Asian Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Rajesh Kumar, Sansuma Brahma, Sh.Francis Monsang
and Mayuri Dilip
4 Investigating Limits to Processing Variability
in SOV Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Apurva and Samar Husain
5 A Correlative Typology Mixing Syntactic and Semantic
Parameters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Rahul Balusu
6 A Comparative Study of the Lexicalization of the Bangla Polar
Question Particle ki and the Assamese Polar Question
Particle ne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Ambalika Guha
7 Comparing Honorifcity Agreement in Maithili and Bangla. . . . . . 157
Preeti Kumari
8 Towards an Understanding of Micro-variations: Decoding
the Hierarchical Module of Variation and the Correlates
of Mappila Malayalam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Thapasya Jayaraj and Rajesh Kumar
9 Variation and Change in Dialects of Marathi:
A Social-Dialectological Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi
viii Contents
10 Parametrizing Ergativity: Insights from Western Indo-Aryan
Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Usha Udaar
11 Cross-Linguistic Variations in the Processing of Ergative Case:
Evidence from Punjabi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Mahima Gulati and Kamal K. Choudhary
12 On Gender Micro-Variation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295