Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia explores the intricacies of the grammars of several of the languages of the South Asian subcontinent. Specifically, the contributors to this volume examine grammatical resources for shaping elaborative, rhyming, and alliterative expressions, conveying the emotions, states, conditions and perceptions of speakers. These forms, often referred to expressives, remain relatively undocumented, until now. It is clear from the evidence on contextualized language use that the grammatically artistic usage of these forms enriches and enlivens both every day and ritualized genres of discourse. The contributors to this volume provide grammatical and sociolinguistic documentation through a typological introduction to the diversity of expressive forms in the languages of South Asia. This book is suitable for students and researchers in South Asian Languages, and language families of the following; Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic.

This volume provides a first of its kind account of expressives in the region from a grammatical, historical, and literary perspective. It provides case studies from the four major language families of South Asia.

Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia explores the intricacies of the grammars of several of the languages of the South Asian subcontinent. Specifically, the contributors to this volume examine grammatical resources for shaping elaborative, rhyming, and alliterative expressions, conveying the emotions, states, conditions and perceptions of speakers. These forms, often referred to expressives, remain relatively undocumented, until now. It is clear from the evidence on contextualized language use that the grammatically artistic usage of these forms enriches and enlivens both every day and ritualized genres of discourse. The contributors to this volume provide grammatical and sociolinguistic documentation through a typological introduction to the diversity of expressive forms in the languages of South Asia. This book is suitable for students and researchers in South Asian Languages, and language families of the following; Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic.

Providing extensive data on a range of European languages, this book highlights the key role expressivity plays in all language.

As “reduplication” is a continuously discussed topic in the field of linguistic typology and morphology there is still the need to reach a deeper understanding of reduplicative processes. This volume aims to explore the boundaries of reduplication proper from an outside angle, i.e. by looking into non-prototypical cases which challenge the formal and functional criteria for reduplication proper. The articles selected cover various linguistic areals from Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe. Abbi explores echo formations and reduplicative expressives in Southeast Asia. Anderson presents an in-depth study on various reduplication phenomena in the Munda language family. Nintemann addresses a formal problem of reduplication proper in Bantu languages. Finkbeiner discusses a case of triplication in German, contrasting it with the framework of reduplication. Kallergi & Konstantinidou provide an detailed insight into several kinds of echo formations in Modern Greek, including diachronic aspects. Rozhanskiy’s focus is on unexpected reduplicative patterns found in the formation of Komi ideophones. Stolz delivers a thorough crosslinguistic investigation on reduplicative phenomena, favouring the canonical approach over the prototype method.

The South Asian languages, mainly Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have become a focus of interest in the formal study of language as a natural consequence of the research program of the Principle and Parameters approach and an enforced interest in exploring the parametrical space of human language. The contributions to the present volume combine theoretical reasoning in syntax and phonology with a comparative research agenda in which South Asian languages figure prominently. The topics range from issues of clause structure, serial verb constructions, cleft- and question formation, to the question of what the proper syntactic format of modification should be, issues of binding theory and raising, and issues of complementation, the clausal periphery and clausal typing. The collection of articles concludes with two chapters on Dravidian and comparative phonology and a chapter on the shaping of phonological awareness by different writing systems. The authors and the editors devote this piece of work to Professor K.A. Jayaseelan, one of present-day India s most influential linguists.