LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 23:11 November 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

Celebrate India!
Unity in Diversity!!

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

Poetic Encounter
Available in https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09TT86S4T

Poems
Naked: the honest browsings of two brown women
Available in https://www.amazon.in

Decrees
Available in https://www.amazon.com

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2023
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

Malayalam Tense Morphology: A Reanalysis Using
Distributed Morphology Lens

Anjali Nair

Abstract

Malayalam roots undergo two kinds of allomorphy in the context of past and non-past tense morphology: - (i) the inflectional tense affixes, and (ii) the verbal stems that select for said inflections. Contemporary accounts to theorise this distribution yielded little to no par- simony. Adapting Lieber’s morpho-lexical rules to Malayalam, Madhavan’s lexical model considers all the stems of word formation to be stored in the permanent lexicon, with the affixes subcategorising for their respective stems. Since this stem storage model of the lexicalist framework is not only expensive on the mental grammar but also fails to distinguish between the stem and affix allomorphy, this paper reanalyses the facts of the Malayalam tense under Distributed Morphology (DM).

Two main characteristics of DM motivate the reanalysis of the Malayalam tense: First, unlike Lieber’s lexicalist framework, the hierarchical configuration of the word is determined by the syntax and not by the subcategorisation frames of the affixes. This allows for the use of the same phonological form across syntactically different forms. Second, DM makes a clear distinction between the rules that trigger the phonological alteration of the affixes, namely Vocabulary insertion rules, and Readjustment rules. Readjustment rules are phonological in nature but also make reference to both the morpho-syntactic features and the identity of particular roots (Halle & Marantz, 1993). Thus, what was seen as arbitrary increments in the Lexicalist model on the stem could be reanalysed as different phonological changes applying to their respective lists of roots.

1. Facts at Hand: Tense in Malayalam

Traditional grammarians claimed that the Malayalam past tense has [tu] as its underlying form with 11 other surface forms.

Other traditional analyses have attempted a classification of verbs into verb classes based on the forms of their past tense alternations (Pillai, 1965). However, a lexicalist account of the same proves these claims to be fallacious (Madhavan, 1983). Based on the lexicalist application of morpho-lexical rules (Lieber, 1980), Madhavan makes two notable claims: (i) He argues that the consonant that accompanies [u] in PST is not part of the past tense allomorph; and (ii) He further shows that the formative has a much larger role to play in word-formation in general. The fact that the consonant does not contribute to the expression of past-ness has also been testified in recent studies (Swenson et al., 2017). In her morpho-semantic analysis of the Malayalam verb, Swenson points out that the fact that the same stem is used for even conjunctive participles to give non-past interpretations shows that the change in the stem is semantically vacuous.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Anjali Nair
Centre for Linguistics
School of Language Literature and Culture Studies (SLL & CL)
Jawaharlal Nehru University
anjalinair.jnu@gmail.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.