Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistics

Department of Linguistics

University of Kashmir

Print ISSN: 0974-3421 Online ISSN: 0974-3421

From the time of the Jam-i-Jahan Numa, the first ever attempt to inscribe Urdu prose for the print journalism, the language of Urdu Journalism has gone through a hard process of transformation. Following the shock delivered by Covid-19, the twenty first century has been the year of profound and rapid change for Urdu print media. The COVID-19 pandemic strongly impacted the media industry and affected journalists' work. Many vernacular newspapers have been severely affected by losses in revenues. Lockdowns and other restrictions helped in breaking old habits of journalism, and created new styles of expressions. It resulted in new linguistic coinages and adoption of new phrases across the globe. The paper attempts to provide an in-depth analysis of the lexical innovations and word crafting of Urdu print media at a time where narratives and moods were related to the spread of COVID-19. The paper makes a comparative analysis of five Urdu print media platforms (Siasat Jadid, Qaumi Awaz, Rashtriya Sahara, Inqilab, and in dinon) to filter out the lexical innovation and word crafting related to the COVID-19 outbreak.

There was a widespread e-learning phenomenon during COVID-19 in 2020. Unfortunately, in a country like Bangladesh at the beginning a huge number of students were out of the reach of internet and unfamiliar with online learning. The purpose of this study is to explore how English as a foreign language (EFL) learning at the tertiary level in Bangladesh was impacted by the sudden shift to online learning. This study evaluates the attitudes, opinion, beliefs of first year university students towards online language classes during COVID-19. Participants from eight universities of Dhaka responded to a Google questionnaire after an online instruction session via messenger room. It also reviews research published since the onset of the pandemic, with a specific focus on English language teaching in EFL contexts, to analyze the challenges faced by Bangladeshi learners since the shift to e-learning. One of the prominent challenges observed was student’s lack of motivation, which upon further review was found to be linked to other contributing factors, such as lack of technical support, unfamiliar learning environments, and lack of self-confidence. However, this study found several unexpected positive outcomes from the digital transformation, including the flexibility of planning personal study period, rewatching the lecture video etc. The current research can contribute as a ground work for offering blended approach in teaching language after the pandemic. It also can contribute to knowledge of online English teaching in other EFL contexts.

Mising is an Eastern Tani1 language of the Tibeto-Burman language family spoken by approximately 680,424 people in 5 districts of Assam and by 7,412 people in Siang and Namsai districts of Arunachal Pradesh. Tani group had previously been categorized by Bradley (1997) as ‘Miric’ i.e., Adi–Galo–Mishing–Nishi-Tagin and by Matisoff (2003) as Abor–Miri–Dafla as a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages. This paper discusses aspects of voicing assimilation in Mising. One of the most common phonological process, assimilation and its subtypes are often controlled and positional. Like some other types of assimilation, voicing assimilation shows positional controlling. In most cases, the value of the feature [voice] spreads from onset to coda which makes voicing assimilation onset-controlled, rather than coda-controlled. This paper is divided into three parts – firstly, a comprehensive description of voicing assimilation is presented; secondly, a language-specific case of voicing assimilation in Mising and thirdly, an Optimality-theoretic analysis of this pattern.

Stylistics is the study of the style and language use in literature, media, and other forms of communication. In advertising, stylistics is used to create effective and persuasive messages by carefully choosing words, phrases, and images that appeal to the target audience and convey the desired message. This includes tone, imagery, and figurative language, as well as the overall structure of the advertisement. Advertisers use stylistic techniques to create feelings of nostalgia or excitement in their audience. These days presence of advertisements has become inevitable in our society. Television commercials today have become more profound and significantthanthe commercials from the past. The TV commercials use significant expressions that employ verbal and nonverbal communication across various mediums. The current study looks at the stylistic characteristics found in Indian television commercials and analyses them. The language used in TV commercials need to be more creative, easy to remember, specific, and defined in how it functions. The study investigates and provides an exploratory and descriptive analysis of the stylistic features most frequently used in Hindi TV Commercials.

The study deals with semantic analysis of temporal terms in Arabic ‘aam’ /ʕ:m/, ‘sana’ /sana/, ‘haul’ /ħawl/ and ‘hija’ /hiʤaʤ/; year in the Holy Qur’an. This study explores how translators have rendered these synonyms into English. It also explores the strategies used by different Qur’an translations in rendering these synonyms into English and to find which translations could be more semantically sensible than others based on exegesis. The findings reveal that some Qur’ anic terms are untranslatable, and finding an appropriate and faithful equivalent in the target language is not possible. The differences and the scarcity of lexical equivalent rendered in the target language are analyzed. The aim of the study is to depict how these terms are different from each other and how much they give the semantic equivalence of the original. This paper follows Charles J. Fillmore’s frame semantics.

The aim of this study is to examine compound verbs (CVs) in Gujarati using a corpus-based methodology by way of identifying combinations of verbal sequences in a POS tagged Corpus. Empirical observations about CVs, their structures, and their occurrence can be made using the corpus, thereby enabling the formulation of morpho-syntactic and syntacto-semantic rules that are verifiable. A CV is generally made via the combination of verbs with other verbs. The present discussion is centered around Compound Verbs (CVs) in Gujarati, focusing on their structure and their patterns of occurrence, as well as the challenges faced in the course of identifying/extracting CVs from a monolingual POS tagged corpus of Gujarati. This paper is a discussion of part of a larger research problem aimed at studying and analysing complex predicates in Gujarati, using electronic corpora. The corpus used for this study is annotated using a broad annotation scheme which labels the morpho-syntactic features in a fair amount of detail.

Khortha is the most widely spoken language in Jharkhand and it is also referred as the eastern variety of Magahi. Khortha belongs to the Indo-Aryan group of languages As per 2011 census Khortha has 8.04 million speakers. Since very few attempts have been made to study the language from linguistic point of view, the present research paper tries to identify and analyze the pattern of person agreement in Khortha. According to Crystal (1995), an agreement is "the formal relationship between elements whereby a form of one word requires a corresponding form of another”. The data for the current study includes both primary and secondary. For collecting the primary data, a field survey was done in the Hazaribagh district of Jharkhand where native speakers of the language were consulted and requested to respond to the questionnaires prepared by the researchers. The sample size for collecting data consisted of 50 people from the different age groups. The secondary sources of data included story books, newspapers, and books of folktales. The findings of the study reveal that agreement markers are very much prominent in the language and they are used in the language depending upon the variations in persons. Agreement markers in the Khortha language are observable as the verbal endings or also at the level of auxiliaries. The research paper contributes to the field of syntax as well as to the field of language documentation by analyzing the structure of the language.

The study establishes that the position of the verbal participle and the auxiliary in Garhwali is based on an aspectual split and proposes an analysis to account for this syntactic phenomenon. With the help of data the researcher will utilize the differentiation between two types of head movement à la Funakoshi (2012) to describe an aspectual split in the structure of Garhwali clause which results in two different orders of V and aux, which seems to stem from these two types of head movements in the language. On the one hand, in the progressive and stative perfective aspects, the movement of the verb from v/V to Asp uses a Set-Merge head movement resulting in the verb and the already existing auxiliary merging in a way that allows further operations to target the auxiliary separate from the verb. In contrast, in the habitual and perfective aspects, only the regular Pair-Merge head movement occurs, and the verb head-moves from v/V to Asp, resulting in its inseparable merger with the auxiliary. It is argued that in order to account for the aspect-based split between V-Aux and Aux-V orders, the possibility of Garhwali allowing for Set-Merge head movement alongside Pair-Merge head movement must be allowed.

Identity in literature has received much theoretical attention recently. But to the best of our knowledge, no studies have applied Identity Process Theory (IPT) to literary text with a view to identifying the relationships between identity processes and the characters in the literary text. IPT is a socio-psychological model that embodies identity as a dynamic product of both social and psychological processes.In this paper, it is argued that the theory provides predictive value and resourceful insights into the structure of religious identity in They Die Strangers. Specifically, it explores the religious identity with a special focus on the values and how these values are processed. IPT proposes that identity is conceptualized in three processes: identity assimilation, identity accommodation, and identity evaluation. These processes will be examined to determine the principles that a given character adopts and uses in identity reconstruction. The motivation for this paper is that it is thought that IPT concepts could be usefully applied in the study of identity in literary texts especially diasporic literature where identity is a recurring theme.

The present paper aims to provide a descriptive and comparative investigation of the acoustic space and formant patterns of vowels in Maithili and Angika. Angika is considered as a variety of Maithili (Jha 1958). Acoustic space is an adequate tool to determine objectively the vowel space in a language. Acoustic space also helps us to revisit Dispersion Theory, and Quantal Theory. The speech data were recorded from twenty native speakers in the Speech and Language lab at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The results of the study present that the formant frequencies (F1 and F2) and acoustic spaces of vowels are distinct in Maithili and Angika. Further, it reflects that the formant frequencies (F1 and F2) and acoustic space of Maithili vowels are greater than that of Angika vowels. The work finally discusses Jha’s (2001) observation with respect to formant frequencies and the positioning of the vowels in acoustic space and claims that the present finding differs from the Jha’s observation.

The paper introduces the working stages of the first-ever initiative in multimedia format for Cholanaikkan /IPA: cʰo:l̺ən̺ ɑɪkʰən/. The aim is to promote preliminary multilingual education based on the mother tongue for the language speakers of this under-resourced minority language. The paper will bring into perspective the language policies and socio-linguistic issues accelerated by the global pandemic in case of this endangered language spoken in a linguistically diverse country. The paper will further discuss in subsequent sections- the motivations, the processes, and the challenges involved in developing a digital dictionary for endangered languages using the methodological underpinnings of lexicography and theoretical understanding of sociolinguistics. Furthermore, the project hopes to explore the scope of language maintenance by expanding the domains of language use and contribute to the possibility of language revitalization efforts among the community members. In conclusion, drawing on the experiences from this dictionary compilation project, the paper will account for knowledge dissemination with regard to the key role played by openaccess resources while documenting an endangered language during COVID pandemic.

The analytic approach to the study of language conceptualizes meaning in terms of three levels: abstract meaning, utterance meaning, and communicative meaning or force. These levels are defined in terms of three different domains: context-free intra-lingual relations, relation between language and its context, and relation between language and its speaker. The paper presents a critique of the notion of levels of meaning. The notion of levels generates hierarchical distinctions like context-free and context-bound, literal and figurative, semantics and pragmatics, etc. It is a conceptual metaphor, rather than a cognitive fact. It is used by linguists to organize and explain disparate facts of language use. The paper discusses an alternative view of meaning in terms of a metaphor of spectrum. The levels are conceptualized as a horizontal structure, where the notions of boundary and hierarchy are important. However, if we turn the structure vertically, then we can view the nature of meaning as a spectrum, where the notion of degree or gradation is important. In that case the distinction between semantics and pragmatics collapses. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section discusses the notion of levels of meaning. The second section provides a critical assessment of this notion. The third section postulates an absence of context as a kind of context. The fourth and final section attempts to provide an alternative view to this notion within the framework of Cognitive Semantics.

The Vendor of Sweets is Narayan's tenth novel based upon the relationship between a stingy or economical father and his completely spoilt son. The father is confronted by the new world shockingly personified- a world where his cherished notions of marriage and morals seem to count for nothing. Central to the story is the generation gap and the crumbling of values of the older generation under the influence of western culture represented by Mali. The new culture brings with it materialistic development but it has brought decay and degeneration of social and cultural values as well. India under British rule underwent conflicts and tension to retain her own spiritual culture but Britishers left the legacy of Individualism over selflessness, English over native language, pragmatism over idealism which left an indelible impression upon the young generation. The present paper focuses on the degrading effect of west on native culture and problems arising out of it and triumph of Indianness and selfless way of life. It is analyzed as post-colonial work of art which believes in the assimilation of best of two worlds.

Adaptation is another way or method of conveying the original or source message to a target audience in a different mode without bothering about cultural differences. In a simple way, we can say that adaptation is about deviation from literality or deviation from originality in terms of adding, deleting, changing, illustrating and so on, but after having these variations, adaptation retains the main idea/theme of the original. The present paper tries to explore and understand deviation from a viewpoint of adaptation in terms of four aspects, namely, setting, character, plot and resolution with reference to the novel “Parizaad” by Hashim Nadeem and its dramatic adaption “Parizaad” by Shehzad Kashmiri.

The present paper tries to capture the socio-cultural and linguistic identity of Bhojpuri speakers through some selected and undocumented proverbs. The cultural iceberg model by Hall (1976) shows that the surface structure of an iceberg represents the physical entities of a community and the deep structure of that iceberg represents the inner world or features of the given community.

This paper aims at under taking a comparative study of the phonological changes of vowels and consonants of Aalu Kurumba and Irula languages spoken in Nilgiri district of Tamil Nadu. The paper adopts descriptive and comparative approaches and study the vowel and consonant changes in the two languages.

Text pre-processing plays an important role in the development of NLP applications. Text pre-processing is the process of transforming unstructured and noisy text data into a clean and consistent format. Linguists create tools and software that aim to facilitate the lexical goals and technical understanding of a language. The available text data of any language cannot be completely improved, which is why many applications of natural language processing do not work optimally, becoming a bottleneck and not achieving the goal. Many techniques are used in text pre-processing, and this technique brings improvements to the cleanliness, accuracy, and correctness of the text.