Speaker:
Associate Professor Paroma Sanyal, India Institute of Technology, Delhi
Paroma Sanyal is a phonologist and syntactician who works on the correspondence between phonological well-formedness and morpho-syntactic realization of words in South Asian Languages. She is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and is also associated with teaching and research in the areas of Cognitive Science, Language Education and Technology and Society. She has been a foundational member of the English Language Learning Centre at IIT Delhi instrumental in introducing activity based language pedagogy and is also the current coordinator of the programme.
Abstract:
In this paper, I show that the morphological paradigms of verbs in modern Indo-Aryan languages exhibit systemic verb root allomorphy. In doing so they inadvertently violate Paradigm Uniformity and potentially violate Anti-Homophony as well. These paradigms are an analytical challenge to any theory of morpho-syntax that tries to pin down the context for allomorphy. Phonologically, the allomorphic forms appear as related strings with one easily derivable from the other through predictable phonotactic changes. The challenge however is in predicting the environments here the changes take place. These contexts are neither phonologically, nor morpho-syntactically definable. Further, such phonotactic changes tend to neutralize underlying contrast and generate additional contexts for homophony. Thus, the morphological paradigms of these languages wilfully flout both the morphological well-formedness principles of Paradigm Uniformity and Anti-Homophony.
Since the languages covered in this talk share a large number of cognates, and it is not uncommon for the native speaker of one to acquire another as a second language, we explore the specific challenges that verb-root allomorphy might present in the context of second language acquisition.