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A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora

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A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora by Luke Horo A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati, Assam-781039 November-2017 2 TH-1980_11614120 Declaration I declare, the dissertation entitled, \A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora" submitted by me to the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics, is an original work carried out by me under the supervision of Dr. Priyankoo Sarmah. I have not submitted the dissertation in any form to another University or Institute for the award of diploma or degree. All external sources used for the completion of this dissertation have been ac- knowledged and cited according to the rules and regulations given by Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Luke Horo Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati-781039, Assam, India November 28, 2017 TH-1980_11614120 Certificate This is to certify that the dissertation entitled, \A Phonetic Description of Assam Sora" submitted by Mr. Luke Horo (Registration Number: 11614120) is an authentic work carried out by him under my supervision. The dissertation fulfills all the re- quirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics as prescribed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. The results in this thesis have not been submitted to any other University or Institute. Dr. Priyankoo Sarmah Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati Guwahati-781039, Assam, India November 28, 2017 TH-1980_11614120 This thesis is dedicated to my family and the Sora community of Assam TH-1980_11614120 Acknowledgements Completing my Phd has been a long and challenging journey that I could not have done on my own. I would like to extend my gratitude and thanks to the many people who supported me and encouraged me throughout the past 6 years. Also, I acknowledge that my entrance into the PhD program and completion of it, would not have been possible without God's grace and presence in my life. I thank God for granting me the strength, courage, and hope needed to complete my PhD study. Secondly, I would like to thank the person most influential in my Phd journey, my advisor Dr. Priyankoo Sarmah. I thank Dr. Sarmah for his continuous support, for his patience, motivation, and vast knowledge of phonetics. His guidance and knowledge helped me immensely all through- out the research and writing of this thesis. Besides my advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my Doctoral Com- mittee: Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta for her knowledge on phonology and for teaching me the course work necessary at the start of my PhD program; Prof. Arupjyoti Saikia for his knowledge on the history of labour mi- gration in Assam; Prof. Rohini Mokashi Punekar for her encouragement during seminar presentations; and Dr. Bidisha Som for her unfailing sup- port. My sincere thanks also goes out to SIL international (Liza Guts, Ken Pretol, and Eric Andwik) for funding my early research from 2011 to 2013, and to PAJHRA for allowing me to do part time research from 2011-2013. TH-1980_11614120 Without their precious support it would not have been possible to conduct this research. I thank my fellow labmates in the Phonetics and Phonology Labora- tory and friends in the Department of HSS for their companionship and camaraderie during meals, tea breaks, and organising conferences. In par- ticular I am thankful to Kalyan Das, my batch mate and friend, for all his advice and encouragement through classes and studying together. I also thank the Phonetics and Phonology Laboratory for providing lab facilities 24x7, accessibility to computers, recording equipment, and high speed in- ternet. Additionally, I would like to thank Lakshminath Bezbaroa central library, IIT Guwahati for giving access to essential books that made my research possible. I am also thankful to Mr. Gitartha Chaliha for providing me the important Sora contacts in Koilamari Tea Estate. Last but not the least I would like to thank my Sora informants, who provided food and shelter wherever I went for my fieldwork. I thank Budbari Sawra of Singrijhan Tea Estate for sitting patiently for several days for data elicitation. I also thank Chandan Sawra of Singrijhan Tea Estate who provided contacts in different regions for me to carry out my field work. I also thank those who accompanied me on field visits: Binud Sawra and Shyamanta Sawra for coming with me to help record informants in Sonitpur district; Amar Nath Sawraw who came to the field locations in Assam and Orissa; Magon Sawra for coming to Udalguri district; and Bikram Sawra for helping me with the data collection in Lakhimpur district. Without their support, collection of field data and completion of this thesis would not have been possible. v TH-1980_11614120 Abstract This work is a phonetic description of Sora, a South Munda language of the Austroasiatic language family. Sora is lesser studied language spoken by the tribes of the same name, residing in parts of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. In the 19th century groups of Sora people migrated from Orissa to Assam as indentured tea labourers. Significantly, the emigrant Sora people did not return to their homelands after the completion of their indenture period. As a result, a considerable number of Soras are also found in Assam. This work particularly describes the Sora language as it is spoken in Assam. Therefore, in order to distinguish it from Sora variety of Orissa, this work uses the names Assam Sora and Orissa Sora. This work also treats the migration of Assam Sora as an important event as the migration caused a complete geographic separation between Assam Sora and Orissa Sora. Additionally, the migration resulted in uprooting Assam Sora from its familiar linguistic environment and transplanting it in a new linguistic environment. Therefore, appart from describing the phonetic properties of Assam Sora, this work also compares the phonetic properties of Assam Sora and Orissa Sora. Phonetic description of Assam Sora is based on field studies conducted in four Sora villages of Assam, where five Sora men and five Sora women were recorded from every village. Subsequently, a field study was also conducted in one Sora village of Orissa in order to make a synchronic comparison between Assam Sora and Orissa Sora. The phonetic proper- TH-1980_11614120 ties of Assam Sora described in this work includes description of vowels, consonants and syllables. The description of vowels, stop consonants, nasals and syllable structure are also substantiated with acoustic analy- sis. Thus, this work provides evidence that (C)V(C) is the basic syllable structure in Assam Sora, and the phoneme inventory of Assam Sora in- cludes six vowels and eighteen consonants. Also, the acoustic analysis in this work confirms that Assam Sora has an iambic stress pattern where, the second syllable is more prominent then the first syllable in disyllables. Thus, prominence of second second syllable is explained with the help of three phonetic cues, namely, vowel duration, fundamental frequency and vowel intensity. Additionally, this work proposes that Assam Sora vowel properties such as vowel height and vowel frontness/backness change as a function of syllable position. Thus, the change in vowel property across syllables is made clear with the help of vowel formants, perceptual dis- tances between adjacent vowels and vowel area spaces. Among consonant phonemes, phonetic description with the help of acoustic analysis is pro- vided for stop consonants and nasal consonants in Assam Sora. This mainly includes classification of voicing contrast in word initial stop con- sonants using VOT measures, classification of word final nasal sounds using nasal formants and anti-formants and classification of word medial glottal stops using spectral measures. Subsequently, by comparing Assam Sora phonetic properties with ex- isting descriptions of Orissa Sora it is observed that while the consonant inventories are fairly similar, there are differences in the vowel inventory. However, existing descriptions of Orissa Sora are inconsistent. For that reason comparison between Assam Sora and existing descriptions of Orissa Sora is inadequate. Therefore, this work compares the synchronic speech vii TH-1980_11614120 data of Assam Sora and Orissa and the comparison is substantiated with acoustic analysis. This work reveals that the phonetic properties of vow- els, stop consonants and word stress are essentially similar in Assam Sora and synchronic Orissa Sora. Thus, this work proposes that even after stay- ing separate for more than a hundred years in two distant geographical locations, the Sora community in Assam has effectively preserved their linguistic characteristics. In this regard, migration history of the Sora community provide insights into the factors that helped the Sora commu- nity to preserve their linguistic peculiarities. The Soras suffered years of subjugation and social seclusion. As a result of theat, the Sora community never got enough opportunities to interact with other linguistic commu- nities of Assam. Also, other communities never showed any inclination to establish social contacts with the Sora community of Assam. Hence, this work concludes that, in spite of being geographically distant from each other, synchronically Assam Sora and Orissa Sora have similar phonetic
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