Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Linguistics, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1974. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 192-197.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1974. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 192-197.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 20, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 236-245). Also issued in print.

Esta dissertação realiza um estudo do parentesco dos índios Irantxe e Myky, habitantes da região oeste do estado de Mato Grosso. Pertencem originalmente a um único grupo que, por razões históricas, passou por um processo de cisão em que estes dois contingentes populacionais foram formados e permaneceram isolados por cerca de setenta anos. Os primeiros falam predominantemente a língua portuguesa, ao passo que os segundos falam fluentemente e apenas a língua indígena nativa. O objetivo deste estudo é perceber como o regime de aliança dravidiano que apresentam subsiste à ausência, ainda que parcial, de seu suporte lingüístico original (caso Irantxe), e como as categorias semânticas se adaptam ao (ou adaptam o) novo esquema vocabular. Este trabalho também consiste em uma análise das práticas reais das alianças matrimoniais praticadas por eles e em uma revisão bibliográfica da literatura existente sobre estas duas populações. / The purpose of this dissertation is to study the kinship system of two indigenous groups from the west of Mato Grosso State: the Irantxe and Myky. Both groups have originated from a same population that was splitted for historic reasons almost a century ago and havent being in contact for almost 7 decades. The Irantxe predominantly speak Portuguese while the Myky have kept their native language. The aim of this work is to investigate how the traditional Dravidian alliance can be preserved in the Irantxe group, without support from their original language and how their Portuguese vocabulary have been adapted to preserve semantic categories used into their native language. Besides, this dissertation also shows how the matrimonial alliances have been brought into practice in both groups and presents a bibliographic revision of the available literature.

Tamil cinema is marked by its remarkable output of films and reception across the globe. More than 5000 films were produced in Tamil during the last century alone, and Tamil films have a longer and denser history of reception among the South East Asian diaspora--in countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, mainly among the Tamilians and other South Indians--than films made in any other Indian language. The studios of Madras, arguably the most influential in shaping a film industry in terms of its form and content outside the classical Hollywood system, were at the center of Tamil cinema's productivity during the defining decades of the 1940s and 50s, a period marked by British Rule, the Second World War, India's independence, and the electoral politics of the Dravidian movement. However, a sustained and scholarly study of this history has been marked by its absence, primarily due to the enormity of the task, the challenges associated with data collection, and the availability of archival materials. Therefore, my primary objective in this dissertation is to fill this void, and study the most eventful period in the history of the Madras studios (1940-57) when they produced their landmark and seminal films. An understanding of the history of the studios and a detailed reading of their major films sheds light on the complex intersection of the cultural, economic, and political factors which shaped the studios and their owners, and the type of productions they were interested in. Tamil cinema is often criticized as verbose and theatrical mainly due to lack of parallel and art cinema movements like in neighboring states of Kerala and Karnataka. The "Madrasi Picture" has become the convenient way to label a melodramatic tearjerker juxtaposed with comedy. My challenge to this perception in this thesis, therefore, is to foreground Tamil Cinema's theatrical roots embedded in folk traditions and the Parsi theatre, and its ability to navigate through multiple influences, and yet retain a specificity of its own in terms of innovative genres, narrative devices, and formats which keep significantly influencing Indian popular cinema.

This dissertation explores the nature and extent of retroflex consonant harmony in South Asia. Using statistics calculated over lexical databases from a broad sample of languages, the study demonstrates that retroflex consonant harmony is an areal trait affecting most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, including languages from at least three of the four major families in the region: Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages in the southern half of the subcontinent do not exhibit retroflex consonant harmony. In South Asia, retroflex consonant harmony is manifested primarily as a static co-occurrence restriction on coronal consonants in roots/words. Historical-comparative evidence reveals that this pattern is the result of retroflex assimilation that is non-local, regressive and conditioned by the similarity of interacting segments. These typological properties stand in contrast to those of other retroflex assimilation patterns, which are local, primarily progressive, and not conditioned by similarity. This is argued to support the hypothesis that local feature spreading and long-distance feature agreement constitute two independent mechanisms of assimilation, each with its own set of typological properties, and that retroflex consonant harmony is the product of agreement, not spreading. Building on this hypothesis, the study offers a formal account of retroflex consonant harmony within the Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) model of Rose & Walker (2004) and Hansson (2001; 2010). Two Indo-Aryan languages, Kalasha and Indus Kohistani, figure prominently throughout the dissertation. These languages exhibit similarity effects that have not been clearly observed in other retroflex consonant harmony systems; retroflexion is contrastive in both non-sibilant (i.e., plosive) and sibilant obstruents (i.e., affricates and fricatives), but harmony applies only within each manner class, not between them. At the same time, harmony is not sensitive to laryngeal features. Theoretical implications of these and other similarity effects are discussed.

This dissertation explores the nature and extent of retroflex consonant harmony in South Asia. Using statistics calculated over lexical databases from a broad sample of languages, the study demonstrates that retroflex consonant harmony is an areal trait affecting most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, including languages from at least three of the four major families in the region: Dravidian, Indo-Aryan and Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages in the southern half of the subcontinent do not exhibit retroflex consonant harmony. In South Asia, retroflex consonant harmony is manifested primarily as a static co-occurrence restriction on coronal consonants in roots/words. Historical-comparative evidence reveals that this pattern is the result of retroflex assimilation that is non-local, regressive and conditioned by the similarity of interacting segments. These typological properties stand in contrast to those of other retroflex assimilation patterns, which are local, primarily progressive, and not conditioned by similarity. This is argued to support the hypothesis that local feature spreading and long-distance feature agreement constitute two independent mechanisms of assimilation, each with its own set of typological properties, and that retroflex consonant harmony is the product of agreement, not spreading. Building on this hypothesis, the study offers a formal account of retroflex consonant harmony within the Agreement by Correspondence (ABC) model of Rose & Walker (2004) and Hansson (2001; 2010). Two Indo-Aryan languages, Kalasha and Indus Kohistani, figure prominently throughout the dissertation. These languages exhibit similarity effects that have not been clearly observed in other retroflex consonant harmony systems; retroflexion is contrastive in both non-sibilant (i.e., plosive) and sibilant obstruents (i.e., affricates and fricatives), but harmony applies only within each manner class, not between them. At the same time, harmony is not sensitive to laryngeal features. Theoretical implications of these and other similarity effects are discussed.

Esta dissertação realiza um estudo do parentesco dos índios Irantxe e Myky, habitantes da região oeste do estado de Mato Grosso. Pertencem originalmente a um único grupo que, por razões históricas, passou por um processo de cisão em que estes dois contingentes populacionais foram formados e permaneceram isolados por cerca de setenta anos. Os primeiros falam predominantemente a língua portuguesa, ao passo que os segundos falam fluentemente e apenas a língua indígena nativa. O objetivo deste estudo é perceber como o regime de aliança dravidiano que apresentam subsiste à ausência, ainda que parcial, de seu suporte lingüístico original (caso Irantxe), e como as categorias semânticas se adaptam ao (ou adaptam o) novo esquema vocabular. Este trabalho também consiste em uma análise das práticas reais das alianças matrimoniais praticadas por eles e em uma revisão bibliográfica da literatura existente sobre estas duas populações. / The purpose of this dissertation is to study the kinship system of two indigenous groups from the west of Mato Grosso State: the Irantxe and Myky. Both groups have originated from a same population that was splitted for historic reasons almost a century ago and havent being in contact for almost 7 decades. The Irantxe predominantly speak Portuguese while the Myky have kept their native language. The aim of this work is to investigate how the traditional Dravidian alliance can be preserved in the Irantxe group, without support from their original language and how their Portuguese vocabulary have been adapted to preserve semantic categories used into their native language. Besides, this dissertation also shows how the matrimonial alliances have been brought into practice in both groups and presents a bibliographic revision of the available literature.

Archaeological and genetic evidence have long supported the notion that the Indian subcontinent played an important role in the dispersal of modern humans out of Africa. In the present study, two Dravidian populations, namely Lingayat (N=101) and Vokkaliga (N=102) were examined using high-resolution analyses of Y-chromosome single nucleotide polymorphism (Y-SNP) and their associated seventeen short tandem repeat (STR) loci. The results revealed a prevalence of the major indigenous Indian Y-haplogroups (H, L, F* and R2), which collectively accounted for three-fourths of the Lingayat and Vokkaliga paternal gene pool. In addition, the presence of ancient lineages such as F*-M213, H*-M69 and C*-M216 suggested that modern humans reached India very early after their migration out of Africa. Finally, high haplotype diversity values at 17 Y-STR loci for Lingayat (0.9981) and Vokkaliga (0.9901) populations as well as the absence of shared haplotypes between them emphasized the importance of independent databases for forensic casework.