Linguistic Structure and Language Dynamics in South Asia

The Eighteenth Roundtable of South Asian Language Analysis (SALA) was organised by the Centre of Linguistics and English School of Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (India), January 4-6, 1997. The conference was attended by scholars from all over the world and about 150 papers were presented in twenty parallel sessions and plenary sessions. This volume is a representative sample of the breadth and quality of research that is being carried out in South Asian linguistics today. Containing twenty-seven papers the volume deals with various aspects. It describes and interprets the concept of language endangerment in the context of the linguistic situation in India since Independence and that of transplanted Indian languages abroad; reports on the results of a 1993 survey of language use and attitudes among descendants of South Indians in Fiji; explores the use of participialisation as a strategy of noun modi-fication in Sambalpuri; examines the nature of syntactic modifications in the Goan Christian dialect of Konkani; aims to discover how listeners deal with the contextual variation of vowels in the context of other vowels. In other papers the volume deals with the gemination of consonant in Sinhala nouns; lexical stress in Hindi, vowel harmony in Bengla; vowel template asymmetry in Bangla verbs. Apart from these there are many papers in the sections of Language, Society and Communication and in Syntax and Semantics.