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Bulletin of the Department of Linguistics ISSN 2319-6165 BULLETIN OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS EDITED BY Abhijit Majumdar NUMBER TWENTY ONE 2019 Department of Linguistics UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA Chief Patron Professor Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee, Vice-Chancellor, University of Calcutta Board of Editors Professor Asis Kumar Chattopadhyay, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic). Professor Minakshi Ray, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (B.A. & F.). Professor Mina Dan, M.A. (Deccan College, Pune), M.Phil (Osmania), Ph.D. (Pune). Dr. Selvyn Jussy, M.A. (JNU), Ph.D. (JNU). Professor Abhijit Majumdar, M.A. (Linguistics), M.A. (Bengali), Ph.D. Dr. Aditi Ghosh, M.A., Ph.D. Dr. Sunandan Kumar Sen, M.A., Ph.D. Edited by Abhijit Majumdar University of Calcutta All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the editor. Office Department of Linguistics ASUTOSH BUILDING 87/1 College Street Kolkata 700 073 TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Note 5 Part I Mina Dan Measuring Language Vitality 11 Abhijit Majumdar: Investigating ‘Thākurmā’r Jhuli’ 23 from the Stylistic Perspective Aditi Ghosh Nationalism as a Threat to Multilingualism 53 Sunandan Kumar Sen Gene and Language 72 Part II (Peer Reviewed) Arpita Ray Rhotics of Bengali 81 Basudha Das English Islands in Bangla-English Speech 98 Debdut Chakraborty Parallelism and Recurrence in Tagore's 116 Short-stories Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar Structural Analysis of Echo Words in 131 Bangla and Hindi: A C-V Skeletal Approach to Echo Reduplication Nivedita Mitra Vowel Template Asymmetries: 144 a Semiotic Aspect Rajeshwari Datta A note on the Limbu community with a 163 comparative observation of two Limbu Dictionaries Ria Guha The Language of Verbal Irony: or is There Any 181 Part III Seminar Proceedings : A Seminar on New Perspectives on Language classification Pabitra Sarkar: Classification, Language, and Classification of 195 Languages (Keynote address) Abstracts of the Seminar papers 203 A Brief Report of the Seminar sessions 207 Editor’s Note The Department of Linguistics takes immense pleasure to publish the current issue of the Bulletin for meeting the concurring demands of the Departmental Faculties and Research Fellows. In order to bring fresh air in the domain of academic activities, an institution is always in need of a free open space for expressing the desired academic spirit and endeavour. This ambition is obviously not beyond the reach of a heritage Department like Linguistics with its long history of glowing tradition. It goes without saying that this Bulletin is an outcome of the passion and commitment of the colleagues in our Department. Their invaluable contribution has certainly enriched the current issue of this esteemed journal. Moreover, this volume is unique in a sense that not only it does offer an open platform for the young researchers of the Department but also encourages them in exchanging free and vibrant ideas. We congratulate our Research Fellows for contributing all-round thought-provoking papers in this volume. The present issue of the journal consists of three parts. Part I contains four articles by the Faculty members of the Department (arranged according to their seniority) and the peer reviewed Part II (alphabetically arranged) presents seven articles by the Research Fellows of the Department. In Part III, this issue presents a brief outline of the proceedings of the seminar on New Perspectives on Language Classification organised by the Department of Linguistics on the February 26th, 2019. This seminar had a unique design with its inherent multidisciplinary insight. The Resource persons were invited from the disciplines of Linguistics, Anthropology and Archaeology. Part III contains the Keynote address delivered by the eminent linguist Prof. Pabitra Sarkar, Abstracts of the original papers read and discussed in the seminar and the Report of the seminar proceedings prepared by the Departmental Research Fellows and the students. The brief overview of the debate and discussion in the said colloquium will certainly bring a unique flavour to the sensible readers about the interdisciplinary vision incorporated in the two sessions of the seminar. A brief sketch of the content of the articles in Part I and Part II may be presented here. In Part I, the first article by Mina Dan presents an enlightening issues related to the task of measuring language vitality, which gains a special significance in case of minority languages especially in the present century. This is because of the awareness and sensitization about the 5 Bulletin of the Department of Linguistics endangered languages. The basic prerequisite for the tasks of documentation and revitalization is to measure the level of language vitality or endangerment. The author reports six scales for measuring such gradation. Abhijit Majumdar in his paper, attempts to explore some significant stylistic features inherent in the well-known Bangla folk narrative Thākurmā’r Jhuli . The author looks through how stylistic devices such as parallelism, substitution, recurrence etc. have become functionally significant discourse strategies in constituting cohesive linkage within the textual frame. Aditi Ghosh, in the light of sociolinguistic perspective, looks at one of the most dominant ideology in contemporary world, i.e. Nationalism and its effect on Multilingualism. The problematic outlook that nationalism adopts towards multilingualism leads to a misleading belief associated with this viewpoint. A briefsurvey result by the author on a section of the Kolkata residents reflects the effect of such ideology. The article by Sunandan Kumar Sen throws light on the interaction between Genetic science and Linguistics. The growth of Genetic science in the recent time has contributed much in the research domain related to origin and migration of human population, biological classification and language family etc. The debates related to the concept of Indo Aryan migration has also been discussed in the paper in reference to the Genomic study. The peer reviewed Part II opens with the article by Arpita Ray. The author in her paper presents an instrumental study related to the analysis of the tokens of the rhotic phoneme(s) in Standard Colloquial Bengali for both isolated word forms and spontaneous speech forms. Such an analysis not only attempts to validate the variations described in the extant literature but also to augment the descriptions with new inferences. Basudha Das in her paper explores different patterns of English island incorporation in Bengali-English bilingual speech and the reason behind their use. The study and analysis provides an insight into the code switching phenomenon in Bengali-English context from the structural point of view. The data are examined by the author within the scope of Matrix Language Framework of Myers-Scotton (1993, 2002). Debdut Chakraborty attempts to make a stylistic analysis of the selected short stories of Galpaguccha composed by Tagore. The paper finds out different contexts of the two stylistic markers, namely parallelism and recurrence and their functional significance within the textual domain. 6 Editor’s Note The article by Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar highlights the description and analysis of the various processes involved in Echo word formation in Bangla and Hindi. The paper provides a formal account of these processes through Alec Marantz’s (1982) theory of reduplication presenting formal account of different reduplicative processes via consonant-vowel skeletal mapping. Nibedita Mitra in her paper deals with the descriptions of certain vowel template asymmetric distribution available at the phonology- morphology interface in Bangla. Methodologically, the paper underlines the role played by the semiotic resources of substantivist analysis and provides a rigorous account of the theoretical tools of substantivism. The main concern of the paper by Rajeshwari Datta is the Limbu community. Limbu is one of the dominant languages of the Tibeto- Burman language family spoken in Eastern Nepal and Sikkim. The author draws a brief sketch of the said community, their language and script and provides a preliminary observation on two specific Limbu dictionaries. The comparative outlook certainly brings to the fore some significant phonological, morphological and lexical differences in the language. Ria Guha in her paper looks into verbal irony from the semantic as well as pragmatic point of view. The author aims to find out whether the semantic part of an utterance contributes to its ironicalness or not. It has rightly been explored in the paper that irony needs to be represented as well as comprehended in an appropriate context. It is the attitude of the communicators more than the meaning associated with the utterance, gets reflected through the use of irony. At the end I like to add some optimistic notes about the academic activities of our promising young Research Fellows of the Department. In the last academic session, most of the Research Fellows of the Department joined the UGC-HRDC programme on Development of Soft Skills, organised by the Department of Psychology, C.U. [29th November - 1st December 2018]. They have also attended and participated in a seminar cum workshop titled Endangered languages and Language documentation in India organised by the Department of Linguistics [ February 27 & 28, 2018]. Two of the Research Fellows went for an Internship at Hamburg, Germany for working in a Bilingual Dictionary Project initiated by Oxford Global Languages [OGL] for building
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