PRITHA CHANDRA
PROFESSOR OF LINGUISITCS
INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DELHI 

I work with the first principles of Transformational Generative Grammar that there is a dedicated grammar machine in the mind, with a set of operations that construct natural language sentences, and that this machine is species-specific and universal. My enquiries are directed at the extent of linguistic variability that this machine can support, and if variation can throw any light on how language(s) may have evolved in the human species.

​Most of the languages I work on are non-standard varieties of the Eastern and Western Indo-Aryan sub-families. These minimally variant grammars are useful tools to understand how specific features/phenomena develop and change over time. 

Currently, I am working on three broad topics: Case, Agreement and Alignment Shifts; The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface & the Emergence and Loss of Honorificity; Standarization and Marginalization of Languages. 

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My research group SynDaC at IIT Delhi investigates phenomena such as case, categories, classifiers, honorificity, and phi-feature variation and change in South Asian languages. For interested students: if you have a theoretical question or an empirical puzzle that you want to explore further, feel free to drop me a line at pritha(at)iitd.ac.in.