Abstracts

The expression of inequality (>) seems to have a privileged status in natural languages. One could imagine that they would just use a lexical item to express this concept. Instead what we find is that languages construct this meaning in rich and varied ways. In this talk, I will attempt to convey the richness and complexity of this system by looking at a very particular facet of this system by looking at nominal comparatives with differentials in Hindi-Urdu. Nominal comparatives in Hindi-Urdu pattern (‘zyādā kitābẽ’) with nominal comparatives in English (‘more books’). However, once we introduce differentials, we see an asymmetry. While English allows for both ‘two more books’ as well as ‘two books more’, Hindi-Urdu only allows for the latter option. ‘do zyādā kitābẽ’ is ungrammatical. We demonstrate, however, that the asymmetry goes further. While it superficially seems that `Ram-ne Ramesh-se do kitābẽ zyādā paṛhī’̃ is parallel to ‘Ram read two books more than Ramesh’, we show that the Hindi-Urdu differential com- paratives have an entirely different analysis. In fact, ‘do kitābẽ' (two books) and ‘zyādā’ (more) do not even form a surface constituent. This can be seen by the fact that postposition cannot combine with the sequence ‘do kitābẽ zyādā’. Hence the string ‘*do kitābẽ zyādā ko’ is ungrammatical. Instead, we argue that Hindi-Urdu differential comparatives pattern with Differential Verbal Comparatives in Mandarin as analyzed in Li (2014). Following Li's analysis, we give a compositional treatment where ‘zyādā’ (more) operates on the main verb as a result of which its first argument is interpreted as a differential. A surprising aspect of our analysis is that differentials can only be expressed with nominal comparatives that appear as bare direct objects or as subjects of unaccusatives. Differentials in all other positions are simply ineffable.

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) is relatively a new but widely varied field. SLA receives insights from many fields, but not limited to generative linguistics, sociology, anthropology, cognitive psychology, etc. This talk intends to cater to linguistic and non-linguistic students and colleagues as well as language educators. The talk begins with a brief introduction to SLA as a field and how it is different from theoretical linguistics and first language acquisition. I would introduce two theories, namely “generative approach to SLA” and “Socio-cultural approach to SLA” and their contributions to language learning and teaching. The talk also highlights the gap between SLA research and foreign/second language teaching. At the end, the future of SLA research and teaching in India will be discussed.


TBA

Neurolinguistics, the study of brain and language, is completely interdisciplinary and uses methods and theories from different fields. In this introductory talk, I highlight the relevance of the field in India. There are around 600/700 languages spoken in India. However, there is very limited work available on Indian languages. People suffer from different kinds of language impairments (Aphasia, Dyslexia, etc.) but there are no diagnosis/ assessment tools available for many Indian languages. I discuss the scope and challenges in detail and suggest that undergraduate students have an opportunity to develop different types of apps, assessment tools, etc. for their projects.