Although a major language in itself, Urdu has borrowed words from three major languages of the world, namely Persian, Arabic and English, with various loan morphological and phonological features. There have been very few studies on this phenomenon, and many features are still unexplored. This study focuses on loanword morphology, and looks at the nature of loanwords borrowed from these three languages. The book begins by examining the morphological adaptation of loanwords. Secondly, parallels and differences are explored between the relatively recent adaptation of English loans and the older adaptation of words from Arabic and Persian. The descriptive content of the book – covering as it does not only English loanwords, but those from Arabic and Persian as well, in addition to examining native Urdu structures – is refreshingly broad. The study itself is primarily descriptive, carefully teasing apart the sometimes complex interactions between syntax, semantics and linguistic function relative to loanword adaptation. However, even beyond the question of loanword adaptation, there is much to recommend itself descriptively here, with regard to the morphological structures of Urdu, including endocentric, exocentric, copulative, postpositional and verbal compounds. In addition to such derivational processes, this study also considers various inflectional issues, such as gender, number and case morphology, the pluralisation of English nominal loans, and the adaptation of English verbs through the use of Urdu dummy verbs. The book offers a good foundation for a more in-depth examination of the data against current morphological theory. Taken as a whole, it not only presents a large quantity of interesting data in pursuing the immediate question of loanword adaptation in Urdu, but also provides a fruitful starting point for a wealth of further investigations into Urdu and into loanword adaptation more generally.

The two-volume set LNCS 9623 + 9624 constitutes revised selected papers from the CICLing 2016 conference which took place in Konya, Turkey, in April 2016. The total of 89 papers presented in the two volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 298 submissions. The book also contains 4 invited papers and a memorial paper on Adam Kilgarriff’s Legacy to Computational Linguistics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: Part I: In memoriam of Adam Kilgarriff; general formalisms; embeddings, language modeling, and sequence labeling; lexical resources and terminology extraction; morphology and part-of-speech tagging; syntax and chunking; named entity recognition; word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution; semantics, discourse, and dialog. Part II: machine translation and multilingualism; sentiment analysis, opinion mining, subjectivity, and social media; text classification and categorization; information extraction; and applications.

This new edition of Understanding Morphology has been fully revised in line with the latest research. It now includes 'big picture' questions to highlight central themes in morphology, as well as research exercises for each chapter. Understanding Morphology presents an introduction to the study of word structure that starts at the very beginning. Assuming no knowledge of the field of morphology on the part of the reader, the book presents a broad range of morphological phenomena from a wide variety of languages. Starting with the core areas of inflection and derivation, the book presents the interfaces between morphology and syntax and between morphology and phonology. The synchronic study of word structure is covered, as are the phenomena of diachronic change, such as analogy and grammaticalization. Theories are presented clearly in accessible language with the main purpose of shedding light on the data, rather than as a goal in themselves. The authors consistently draw on the best research available, thus utilizing and discussing both functionalist and generative theoretical approaches. Each chapter includes a summary, suggestions for further reading, and exercises. As such this is the ideal book for both beginning students of linguistics, or anyone in a related discipline looking for a first introduction to morphology.

In Srinagar Burushaski: A Descriptive and Comparative Account with Analyzed Texts Sadaf Munshi offers the structural description of a lesser-known regional variety of Burushaski spoken in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian-administered state of Jammu & Kashmir. The description includes a comprehensive and comparative account of the structural features of Srinagar Burushaski in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The grammar is supported by an extensive digital corpus housed at the University of North Texas Digital Library. Using contemporary spoken language samples from Srinagar, Nagar, Hunza and Yasin varieties of Burushaski as well as data from the available literature, Munshi provides a thorough understanding of the historical development of Srinagar Burushaski, complementing the existing studies on Burushaski dialectology.

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Intelligent Technologies and Applications, INTAP 2019, held in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, in November 2019. The 60 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 224 submissions. Additionally, the volume presents 1 invited paper. The papers of this volume are organized in topical sections on AI and health; sentiment analysis; intelligent applications; social media analytics; business intelligence;Natural Language Processing; information extraction; machine learning; smart systems; semantic web; decision support systems; image analysis; automated software engineering.

The increasing globalization and centralization in the world is threatening the existence of a large number of smaller languages. In South Asia some locally dominant languages (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Nepali) are gaining ground beside English at the expense of the lesser-known languages. Despite a long history of stable multilingualism, language death is not uncommon in the South Asian context. We do not know how the language situation in South Asia will be affected by modern information and communication technologies: Will cultural and linguistic diversity be strengthened or weakened as they become increasingly prevalent in all walks of life? This volume brings together areas of research that so far do not interact to any significant extent: traditional South Asian descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics, documentary linguistics, issues of intellectual and cultural property and fieldwork ethics, and language technology. Researchers working in the areas of documentary linguistics and language technology have become aware of each other in the last few years, and of how work in the other area could be potentially useful in furthering their own aims. Similarly, the insights of documentary linguistics are making their way into descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics. However, the potential for synergy among these areas of research is almost limitless. This volume provides the reader, not so much with a do-it-yourself recipe for applying modern technology to the problem of language shift in South Asia today, but rather with some basic knowledge about the problems involved and some directions from which solutions could be forthcoming, a toolbox rather than a blueprint, for helping to shape the linguistic future of South Asia.