P.hd in English:Areal Typology and Language Contact

P.hd in English:Areal Typology and Language Contact

This course is a survey of current research in areas and issues in Biolinguistics. It also proposes to cover a variety of approaches to language design (as a biological system) and the evolution of language. Some of the major areas of research will be covered in the following sections:

s Acquisition of speech and language

s Cognition and perception studies through different disorders of communication.

s Studies in lateralization and localization of language in brain through imaging techniques.

s Genes and language/speech.

s Speech and voice patterns of genetically related people

s Language and evolution

The aim is to teach students to identify linguistic structures that are shared across typologically different and genetically distinct languages of South Asia. The focus of teaching and research is on the common semantic constructs and their associated similar linguistic structurations. India as a Linguistic Area concept is thus not seen in its traditional taxonomic sense but as an area marking structures manifested in various but shared grammatical and semantic aspects.

Generally diverse languages that coexist in geographical proximity change the course of the developments of various contiguous languages toward typological homogeneity leading to areal universals. A comparison of such areal universal features with language universals is made to bring into focus the linguistic typology of South Asia. Areal typological investigation of the phenomena of Reduplication and Explicator compound Verbs has already been made for more than 40 languages of India by the Centre.