16 -17 September 2024
Annexe Hall, IC&SR
The grammatical category of Voice manifests itself in many different ways, typically in the form of an alternation between two diathesis patterns, i.e., active and passive. It has a strong connection with the category. For example, in English, the voice marking participle -en is a mixed category showing both verbal (lunch is eaten at noon) and adjectival (the food remained uneaten) properties. Mixed categories raise various questions for morphosyntactic analysis, especially regarding the functional superstructure that defines them. Voice is an important player in this connection. Predication is central not just to Voice alternations but also to other relationships between two phrasal categories, including the relation between a predicate nominal and its subject (Mary is a nice person). Predication relations frequently require an element of ‘verbal glue’ between the subject and the predicate — the copula (in the English example of the previous sentence). The syntactic distribution of the copula is cross-linguistically highly variable and has given rise to much discussion. Another aspect of the categorial status of the main predicate of a sentence is case alignment. Indian languages frequently show mixed alignment (nominativeaccusative and ergative-absolutive), oscillating between the two main patterns depending on the categorial status of the main predicate. The connection between case alignment and category is a topic of discussion in linguistics literature. The proposed symposium addresses various questions related to these three categories, i.e., voice, copula and ergativity from the perspective of Indian languages.
Receiving the PhD degree for her work 'One the interaction of honorification, copula and definiteness: a variationist approach.' The convocation was presided over by Dr. Paul Appasamy (former Director of Madras Institute of Development Studies and Madras School of Economics) at the Computer Science seminar hall
Anindita Sahoo visited the University of Birmingham in the Summer of 2023. She collaborates with Prof. Dagmar Divjak on a construal study to understand passive voice constructions in Indian languages and the associated cognitive load that it carries when used in isolation in the discourse.
Presenting 'Code-switching and Code-mixing in Parsi Gujarati: A Structural Analysis in the 18th International Pragmatics Conference 9-14th July 2023 Held at Universite Libre de Bruxelles Brussels, Belgium
Receiving IIE travel grant award for the 4th Cycle from Global Engagement office head from Prof. Raghunathan Rangaswamy. Prem will be working in The ELTE University, Hungary, with this fund, in March 2024 as a visiting research scholar with Prof. Marcel den DIkken.
Presented 'Investigating Grammatical Voice in Tamil' in the conference 'All About Voice: a Crosslinguistic perspective', April 14-15