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The dissertation presents a comparative synchronic study of the morphosyntactic features of modern spoken Sinhala and Tamil, the two main languages of Sri Lanka. The main motivation of the research is that Sinhala and Tamil, two languages of diverse origins—the New Indo-Aryan (NIA) and Dravidian families respectively—share a wide spectrum of morphosyntactic features. Sinhala has long been isolated from the other NIA languages and co-existed with Tamil in Sri Lanka ever since both reached Sri Lanka from India. This coexistence, it is believed, led to what is known as the contact-induced restructuring that Sinhala morphosyntax has undergone on the model of Tamil, while retaining its NIA lexicon. Moreover, as languages of South Asia, the two languages share the areal features of this region. The research seeks to address the following questions: (i) What features do the two languages share and what features do they not share?; (ii) Are the features that they share areal features of the region or those diffused into one another owing to contact?; (iii) If the features that they share are due to contact, has diffusion taken place unidirectionally or bidirectionally?; and (iv) Does contact have any role to play with respect to features that they do not share? The claim that this research intends to substantiate is that Sinhala has undergone morphosyntactic restructuring on the model of Tamil. The research, therefore, attempts to answer another question: (v) Can the morphosyntactic restructuring that Sinhala has undergone be explained in syntactic terms? The morphosyntactic features of the two languages are analyzed at macro- and micro-levels. At the macro-level, a wide range of morphosyntactic features of Tamil and Sinhala, and those of seven other languages of the region are compared with a view to determining the origins of these features and showing the large scale morphosyntactic convergence between Sinhala and Tamil and the divergence between Sinhala and other NIA languages. At the micro-level the dissertation analyzes in detail two morphosyntactic phenomena, namely null arguments and focus constructions. It examines whether subject/verb agreement, which is different across the two languages, plays a role in the licensing of null arguments in each language. It also examines the nature of the changes Sinhala morphosyntax has undergone because of the two kinds of Tamil focus constructions that Sinhala has replicated. It is hoped, that this dissertation will make a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the morphosyntax of the two languages, the effects of language contact on morphosyntax, and more generally, the nature of linguistic variation.

The main aim of this thesis is to present an analysis of the serial verb construction in Gojri, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Jammu and Kashmir and in some parts of Pakistan and India.

This thesis discusses the syntax of complex sentences in Sinhalese within the framework of a generative transformational theory of grammar as outlined in Chomsky (1957), and since developed by him and others. The particular model for this study is the 'Standard Theory' of Chomsky (1965). The Introduction outlines the theoretical framework of the study, and gives a brief description of Sinhalese. The particular variety of Sinhalese discussed is specified, and an account of the linguistic investigation of Sinhalese given. Chapter 2 presents a phrase structure grammar capable of generating simple sentences in Sinhalese. Chapter 3 introduces one of the principal mechanisms of complex sentence formation, relativisation. It is demonstrated that the processes of relativisation suffice to derive several types of nominal modifiers. Chapter 4 introduces another major recursive mechanism, complementation. Several types of complement constructions are discussed, and the majority are shown to be NP complements. A few types appear to be VP complements, but conditions are suggested under which they could be considered NP complements. Chapters 5 to 8 examine a series of special constructions. All except one are shown to be derived from complex underlying structures, and it is demonstrated that the general principles of complementation can handle all these. It is argued that pseudo-cleft sentences however, are derived from underlying simple sentences. Chapter 5 deals with modal constructions. Chapter 6 with involitive sentences. Chapter 7 with causative sentences, and Chapter 8 with sentences of emphatic assertion and negation, and pseudo-cleft constructions. Chapter 9 examines a third major recursive mechanism, conjunction. Chapter 10 introduces adverbials, and examines tentatively the suggestion that few additional rules are required to account for such constructions. Finally, Chapter 11 discusses, again tentatively, a rather different type of complex sentence, comparative constructions.

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Building machine translation systems for many South Asian languages (such as Hindi, Gujarati, etc.) using statistical methods is problematic. The primary reason is insufficient parallel data to learn accurate word alignment. Additionally, these languages are morphologically rich and have free word order. When it is difficult to rely purely on statistical methods due to insufficient data, research shows that better performance can be obtained by building hybrid systems that rely on language specific resources, such as morphological analysers or dictionaries, as well as statistical methods. However, it is difficult to find such language specific resources for many South Asian languages. Since languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi and Marathi are all very similar in structure and the main differences lie in the script and vocabulary used for these languages, we hypothesise that it is possible to develop resources for one of these languages and generalize the approach to allow rapid bootstrapping of similar resources for the other closely related languages -- with minimal effort and similar accuracies. To verify this, we develop a few resources for the Hindi language, including a sentence alignment algorithm, a morphological analyser and a transliteration similarity component and generalize the approach to allow rapid bootstrapping of similar resources for the Gujarati language. We show that the approach works on both the Hindi and Gujarati languages and achieves results that are comparable to similar state-of-the-art (SOA) resources available for these languages. We also hypothesise that it is possible to develop a high performance hybrid word alignment algorithm that relies on such language specific resources. To verify this, we design, implement and evaluate a novel English-Hindi hybrid word alignment system that uses the Hindi specific resources developed by us. Not only do we show our word alignment system outperforms other SOA English-Hindi word alignment systems, but also how simple it is to adapt it to the English-Gujarati language pair.

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No description available.

The functional and formative properties of speech sounds are usually referred to as acoustic-phonetics in linguistics. This research aims to demonstrate acoustic-phonetic features of the elemental sounds of Sindhi, which is a branch of the Indo-European family of languages mainly spoken in the Sindh province of Pakistan and in some parts of India. In addition to the available articulatory-phonetic knowledge; acoustic-phonetic knowledge has been classified for the identification and classification of Sindhi language sounds. Determining the acoustic features of the language sounds helps to bring together the sounds with similar acoustic characteristics under the name of one natural class of meaningful phonemes. The obtained acoustic features and corresponding statistical results for a particular natural class of phonemes provides a clear understanding of the meaningful phonemes of Sindhi and it also helps to eliminate redundant sounds present in the inventory. At present Sindhi includes nine redundant, three interchanging, three substituting, and three confused pairs of consonant sounds. Some of the unique acoustic-phonetic features of Sindhi highlighted in this study are determining the acoustic features of the large number of the contrastive voiced implosives of Sindhi and the acoustic impact of the language flexibility in terms of the insertion and digestion of the short vowels in the utterance. In addition to this the issue of the presence of the affricate class of sounds and the diphthongs in Sindhi is addressed. The compilation of the meaningful language phoneme set by learning their acoustic-phonetic features serves one of the major goals of this study; because twelve such sounds of Sindhi are studied that are not yet part of the language alphabet. The main acoustic features learned for the phonological structures of Sindhi are the fundamental frequency, formants, and the duration — along with the analysis of the obtained acoustic waveforms, the formant tracks and the computer generated spectrograms. The impetus for doing such research comes from the fact that detailed knowledge of the sound characteristics of the language-elements has a broad variety of applications — from developing accurate synthetic speech production systems to modeling robust speaker-independent speech recognizers. The major research achievements and contributions this study provides in the field include the compilation and classification of the elemental sounds of Sindhi. Comprehensive measurement of the acoustic features of the language sounds; suitable to be incorporated into the design of a Sindhi ASR system. Understanding of the dialect specific acoustic variation of the elemental sounds of Sindhi. A speech database comprising the voice samples of the native Sindhi speakers. Identification of the language‘s redundant, substituting and interchanging pairs of sounds. Identification of the language‘s sounds that can potentially lead to the segmentation and recognition errors for a Sindhi ASR system design. The research achievements of this study create the fundamental building blocks for future work to design a state-of-the-art prototype, which is: gender and environment independent, continuous and conversational ASR system for Sindhi.