Parts, Axial Parts, and Next Parts in Kannada

Nouns meaning ‘place, region’ and ‘part’ are compounded in Kannada with a `bleached’ noun (a putative postposition) to form AxPart and Part readings. As in other languages, the AxPart or ‘region’ reading does not pluralize, does not permit adjectival modification, and allows for MeasureP modification (unlike the part reading). AxParts may also be formed out of nouns by the fusion of a dative marker or a genitive marker with the N; these case markers introduce the Place element. The dative case may be optionally overt (e.g. pakka-kke ‘side-dative,’ ‘to a side’), or covert (in AxParts like munde ‘front’). The genitive marker gives a sense of immediate adjacency that we designate the NextPart reading. Interestingly, the dative and genitive cases in Kannada also allow nouns to assume the function of predicative and attributive adjectives

R. Amritavalli (RA) talks to Chiranjiv Singh (CS)

Chiranjiv Singh has been called a “Renaissance man”. A former Ambassador of India to UNESCO in Paris, Singh is an administrator with a keen interest in art, literature, music and languages. He retired in 2005 as additional chief secretary to the Government of Karnataka, which honoured him with a “Rajyotsava” award. He has been President of the Alliance Française, Bangalore, receiving the French knighthood, Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite; and served on the governing bodies of the Indian Institute of Science and the Institute of Social and Economic Change (both in Bengaluru)

Autonomy in language learning and teaching : new research agendas

If the title of this edited volume of 6 Chapters (Chapter 1 the Introduction) suggests proximity of its concerns to the theme of this issue of – informal language learning by adults, its subtitle “New Research Agendas” is perhaps portentous of its departures from that theme. Exploring the “who, what, when, where and why” of learner autonomy (Introduction, p. 2), the book takes us into “contextual constraints” (Chapter 3), “group processes” (Chapter 4), “digital practices” (Chapter 5), and “human geography and mediated discourse analysis” (Chapter 6). Chapters 3 and 4 LLT deal with formal learning contexts. Nevertheless, there are connections between its explorations and the concerns in this

Helping children become readers

Literacy, for the purposes of the census, is the ability to write one’s name. But to reduce literacy to a signature is obviously to trivialize it.Nor is literacy merely the ability to recognize alphabets, and to put them together to read words, or to read a text. Although all these skills are part of the road to literacy, true literacy is the ability to read independently, a text of one’s choice, and understand it. (Note that literacy is not merely the ability to read a textbook and answer questions based on it, just as arithmetic is not simply the ability to learn up the correct solution to every problem in a given book.

Peer Interaction and second Language learning: Pedagogical potential and research agenda

Michael Long's “Input, interaction and second language acquisition” was published in 1981; Krashen's input hypothesis in 1982 and 1985. According to the input hypothesis, the learner's mental grammar determines both comprehensibility and the next (i+1) stage of input relevant to acquisition. Long, while acknowledging the role of input, argued in favour of the facilitative role of interaction in SLA. According to him, learner interaction drives conversational and linguistic modifications that make input comprehensible. As learners “negotiate” with native speakers for meaning, input may get modified, manifesting for example as “foreigner talk”. Moreover, it is during interaction and corrective feedback that learners may “notice” lexical or syntactic aspects of the language

Second language acquisition

There are some things that human beings naturally do, given the mere opportunity to do so. Walking and talking are the foremost examples of such skills. Babies are not born walking and talking, but by the age of three they usually are doing both. Walking and talking occur naturally in the course of a human being's physical or mental maturation; these abilities are not “taught,” or “learnt” consciously. Similarly, we talk of unconscious language acquisition by the human infant, rather than language learning

Understanding learning at the primary level

Teachers at the primary level may not be subject specialists, but they need to be specialists in two important respects: they need to understand what it means to learn, and they need to understand what it is to be a child. Today I wish to share with you some of my understanding about these two topics, in order to address the question of how we can bring about learning (including language learning) in our classrooms

Learner autonomy in developing countries

Learner autonomy may have special relevance now in developing countries, where a dissonance often exists between what formal education offers and what many learners want or need. Globalization and its technologies are providing new means of accessing knowledge, but school language lessons remain largely unchanged. Almost by default, successful language learners in developing country contexts are autonomous learners who can exploit out-of-school resources, while some of the most effective pedagogy involves promoting autonomy as a means of confronting low-resource challenges. This chapter argues for more research into both these phenomena, in order to increase understanding of them and to enable identification of principles for practice. It also emphasizes the need for such research to be conducted with and by local teachers and learners

Second language acquisition

There are some things that human beings naturally do, given the mere opportunity to do so. Walking and talking are the foremost examples of such skills. Babies are not born walking and talking, but by the age of three they usually are doing both. Walking and talking occur naturally in the course of a human being's physical or mental maturation; these abilities are not “taught,” or “learnt” consciously. Similarly, we talk of unconscious language acquisition by the human infant, rather than language learning

Morphosyntax of Dravidian Languages

The Dravidian languages, spoken mainly in southern India and south Asia, were identified as a separate language family between 1816 and 1856. Four of the 26 Dravidian languages, namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, have long literary traditions, the earliest dating back to the 1st century ce. Currently these four languages have among them over 200 million speakers in south Asia. The languages exhibit prototypical OV (object–verb) properties but relatively free word order, and are rich in nominal and verbal inflection; only Malayalam lacks verb agreement. A typical characteristic of Dravidian, which is also an areal characteristic of south Asian languages, is that experiencers and inalienable possessors are case-marked dative. Another is the serialization of verbs by the use of participles, and the use of light verbs to indicate aspectual meaning such as completion, self- or nonself-benefaction, and reflexivization. Subjects, and arguments in general (e.g., direct and indirect objects), may be nonovert. So is the copula, except in Malayalam. A number of properties of Dravidian are of interest from a universalist perspective, beginning with the observation that not all syntactic categories N, V, A, and P are primitive. Dravidian postpositions are nominal or verbal in origin. A mere 30 Proto-Dravidian roots have been identified as adjectival; the adjectival function is performed by inflected verbs (participles) and nouns. The nominal encoding of experiences (e.g., as fear rather than afraid/afeared) and the absence of the verb have arguably correlate with the appearance of dative case on experiencers. “Possessed” or genitive-marked N may fulfill the adjectival function, as noticed for languages like Ulwa (a less exotic parallel is the English of-possessive construction: circles of light, cloth of gold). More uniquely perhaps, Kannada instantiates dative-marked N as predicative adjectives. A recent argument that Malayalam verbs originate as dative-marked N suggests both that N is the only primitive syntactic category, and the seminal role of the dative case. Other important aspects of Dravidian morphosyntax to receive attention are anaphors and pronouns (not discussed here; see separate article, anaphora in Dravidian), in particular the long-distance anaphor taan and the verbal reflexive morpheme; question (wh-) words and the question/disjunction morphemes, which combine in a semantically transparent way to form quantifier words like someone; the use of reduplication for distributive quantification; and the occurrence of ‘monstrous agreement’ (first-person agreement in clauses embedded under a speech predicate, triggered by matrix third-person antecedents). Traditionally, agreement has been considered the finiteness marker in Dravidian. Modals, and a finite form of negation, also serve to mark finiteness. The nonfinite verbal complement to the finite negative may give the negative clause a tense interpretation. Dravidian thus attests matrix nonfinite verbs in finite clauses, challenging the equation of finiteness with tense. The Dravidian languages are considered wh-in situ languages. However, wh-words in Malayalam appear in a pre-verbal position in the unmarked word order. The apparently rightward movement of some wh-arguments could be explained by assuming a universal VO order, and wh-movement to a preverbal focus phrase. An alternative analysis is that the verb undergoes V-to-C movement.</p