Description
The Dravidian languages of south India, spoken by approximately 222 million speakers across South Asia, form one of the largest language families in the world. First recognized as a distinct group in the early-to-mid 19th century, the pioneering scholarship on Dravidian languages emerged in the 1970s within the Generative Linguistics paradigm. Half a century later, the body of scholarship on Dravidian languages, employing varied analytical frameworks, serves to deepen our understanding of this unique linguistic family.The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian Languages offers an accessible introduction to Dravidian languages and linguistics from a broad interdisciplinary perspective. The text examines the languages through studies that highlight their long histories, vast literatures, and current robust presence in communication. Beyond formal linguistics, the chapters cover diverse areas of inquiry such as cognition and conceptual representation, comparative philology, language and politics, lexicology, literature and literary history, and multilingualism. This Handbook compiles current, trend-setting scholarship in Dravidian studies, exploring the origins of the Dravidian peoples, their languages, and the history of script in the Indian subcontinent.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Dravidian LanguagesR. Amritavalli and Bhuvana Narasimhan 2. The Dravidian Languages: An OverviewSuresh Kolichala Section I. Formal Analyses3. Dravidian Word Order and the Clausal PeripheriesK. A. Jayaseelan 4. Perspectival Anaphora: a Case Study From TamilSandhya Sundaresan5. Allocutive Agreement in DravidianThomas McFadden 6. Fine-tuning the Dravidian Left Periphery: The Three "Complementisers" in TeluguRahul Balusu7. Genericity, Quantification, and Modality in Malayalam: The Many Faces of -Um and -UnnuHany Babu M. T.8. Gradability and Comparison in KannadaSindhu Herur and R. Amritavalli Section II. Traditional And Contemporary Language Studies9. Correlative Structures in DravidianSanford Steever 10. Asyndetic Conditional Clauses in BrahuiMasato Kobayashi and Liaquat Ali 11. Verb base alternations in Betta KurumbaGail Coelho12. Agreement in Malto Conjunctive ParticiplesMasato KobayashiSection III. Language Processing, Acquisition, And Impairment13. Psycholinguistic studies in Dravidian languagesBhuvana Narasimhan and Annu Kurian-Mathew14. Electrophysiological Investigations of Sentence Processing in TamilR. Muralikrishnan15. The Acquisition of Differential Object-Marking in TamilAnnu Kurian-Mathew and Bhuvana Narasimhan 16. Dravidian Contributions to the Theory of Language AcquisitionJeffrey Lidz17. The Acquisition of Negation and Finiteness in TamilR. Amritavalli18. Possible Morphosyntactic Markers of Specific Language Impairment in KannadaShivani Tiwari, Pratibha Karanth and R. Amritavalli19. Inflections in Home and School LanguagesMadhavi Gayathri Raman20. Malayalam and Core Dravidian Phonology: A View from Early Language AcquisitionGayathri G. Krishnan, Arathi Raghunathan, and Vaijayanthi M. SarmaSection IV. Literary Creativity and Languages in Contact 21. The World of the Tamil Sangam PoetryManu V. Devadevan22. The Trajectory of Tamil in CinemaSwarnavel Eswaran23. The Tamil Response to Cosmopolitan Languages in ContactE. Annamalai and T. Sriraman24. Syntactic Maintenance of Tamil Relative Clauses in Multilingual Adolescents Usha Lakshmanan 25. Multilingualism in the Evolution of Dravidian LanguagesS. N. Sridhar Section V. Literacy and Lexicography26. From Brahmi to Early Kannada: Script, Scribes, and their SocietyS. Settar27. Literacy and its Acquisition in KannadaSonali Nag 28. Currents in Tamil LexicographyGregory James and V. Jayadevan29. The Legacy of Kannada DictionariesS. L. Srinivasa MurthyIndex
