Hiram Ring

This thesis provides an initial descriptive analysis of a largely undescribed Austroasiatic language of Meghalaya, northeast India. Pnar has often been overlooked because of its lexical similarity to Khasi, with which it shares a common identity and society. Features such as verb-initial constituent order, processes of nominalization and derivation, prepositional marking, a rich gender system, a large set of deictic markers, and its use of plural marking within classifier phrases prove that Pnar is richly deserving of study. The following pages attempt to thoroughly examine the phonological, morphological, and grammatical structure of this language for the benefit of the speakers and the larger linguistic community. Appendices include a selection of texts, a list of elaborate expressions, and a 1,600 word lexicon.

Dedicated url: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62519

The Khasian family is striking in exhibiting both grammatical gender and numeral classifier systems, as well as the additional feature of grammatical plural marking within numeral classifier phrases (Rabel 1961; Nagaraja 1985; Ring 2015). Located in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya in an area frequently observed to be a contact zone for cultures and language groups (Chelliah & Lester 20164), this group of lects belongs to the Austroasiatic phylum, but remains separated from their closest relatives by Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages. As gender marking in particular is unusual for Austroasiatic languages, it is currently an open question how this system arose. This paper provides a description of the gender and classifier systems in Khasian varieties as well as an initial hypothesis for how gender developed, based on an ongoing research project among the Khasian group. 1

This chapter focuses on describing the current state of knowledge of constituent order in Khasian languages. In doing so, the chapter also investigates how our understanding of constituent order combined with insight from pronominal systems in other Austroasiatic languages may shed light on the development of grammatical gender in Khasian languages. A series of interlocking issues are identified as crucial for understanding the development of the gender system: the potential role of nominalization, compounding, and elaborate expressions.

We analyse how sociocultural gender can be reflected through grammatical gender and select Hindi (Indo-European) and Pnar (Austroasiatic) as case studies. We demonstrate that these grammatical gender systems share universal tendencies based on human cognition, i.e. associating long, thin, and vertical objects with masculine grammatical gender whereas round, flat, horizontal ones are associated with feminine grammatical gender. We also show that these grammatical gender systems distinguish between sociocultural values of the language speakers. Speakers of Hindi maintain a patrilineal kinship system, and in their language objects of large size are generally assigned to the masculine gender. Pnar kinship is matrilineal and in the language large sized objects tend to be associated with feminine gender. Similar asymmetries are observed with regard to generic gender and gender reversal. These results contribute to the impact of universal cognitive principles and culture on grammatical structures by showing that both tendencies are not necessarily complementary and that they can co-exist in the same language.

Full paper: http://hdl.handle.net/10524/52438
This paper revisits claims regarding the division between Mon-Khmer and Munda languages on prosodic grounds (Donegan and Stampe 1983, 2002, 2004; Donegan 1993). Specifically, we attempt to re-evaluate their claims by investigating pitch at the level of the word in three languages from different families within the Austroasiatic phylum. First, we critique Donegan and Stampe's work, presenting data on Sora and other Munda languages showing a similar prosodic pattern across the whole family that does not conform to claims of a rhythmic holistic shift in prosody to the degree previously suggested. Second, we present a pilot acoustic study of Sora phrasal prosody in comparison with prosodic structures in both Pnar, a language in the Khasian group (the Munda languages' geographically nearest relatives), and prosody in Lawa, a Palaungic language. We find that Khasian word/phrase prosodic structures are quite similar to those found in many Munda languages, which has interesting implications for our understanding of the development of Austroasiatic languages.

Pnar, an Austroasiatic (AA) language located in the state of Meghalaya in northeast India, is typologically interesting because of its range of nominalization strategies. These include derivational verbal morphology, pronominal gendered noun-class clitics that derive nouns when they attach to verbs, and a relativizer. The relativizer wa has intriguing similarities to the function of some nominalizers in nearby Tibeto-Burman languages (as identified by Matisoff (1972) for Lahu, and for other languages in the area by Noonan (1997); Bickel (1999); Watters (2008) among others). Unlike most TB languages, however, this relativizer is pre-verbal, more similar to constructions in other AA languages. Similar in form is the wa ‘with/and’ comitative coordinator that also occurs in Pnar. In this paper I review the morphemes, their syntax and interaction.

Pnar, a Mon-Khmer language of Meghalaya, India, has 28 phonemes: 7 vowels and 21 consonants. The language also exhibits onset clusters that go against traditional views of sonority sequencing principles. I consulted two Jowai-Pnar male speakers of 26 and 25 years of age for this analysis, recording around 680 words which each speaker uttered twice. This resulted in over 1,400 tokens per speaker (some words were said more than twice). The resulting sound files were segmented using Praat for detailed acoustic analysis including duration, intensity, and formant measurements, allowing for quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of individual sounds.

This guide was initially developed in 2011 to accompany a workshop on Praat for students of the North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong, Meghalaya, India, when I was a PhD Student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. It is intended merely as an introduction and assumes a working knowledge of phonetics and phonology. It is by no means comprehensive and users of this guide are expected to pursue questions raised by the exercises via other channels, particularly published phonetics and phonology papers that use Praat to deal with issues found in languages of the world. The sound files used here are from the author's research into the Pnar language of the Jaintia Hills, Meghalaya, India. The script used in the final section has been modified from an original script by Bert Remijsen (2004) for the author's personal research. This document has been updated [March 3, 2015] to include a second Praat script that displays the formants of vowels in Praat's visualization window.

This data paper gives some initial background and describes the function and use of a program bundled as a Python script and Windows executable file and intended to be used by Field Linguists. The program has been developed as a standalone solution inspired by Andrew Margetts' online converter. The purpose is to take a Transcriber file annotated with timecodes and convert it to a Toolbox document in order to preserve the timecodes, allowing playback of a linked sound file in a Toolbox project. The script can be configured to the individual user via a text-editable configuration file.

In previous studies, bilingualism has been linked to faster reaction times (RTs) among individuals responding to Simon Tasks that require inhibitory or attentional control (Bialystock et al., 2004-2009; Colzato et al., 2008; Romano et al., 2007; Carlson and Meltzoff 2008; Chichibu et al., 2008). These studies were conducted among bilinguals who spoke pairs of different languages with similar results - the greatest differences were found between young children and older adults, with a smaller but noticeable effect among younger adults. What is not clear is whether the effect can also be observed among multilinguals: do multilinguals have faster RTs than bilinguals? This pilot study uses a similar task to the Simon Task (the Go/No-Go task) to replicate previous findings about bilinguals while also extending our understanding of multilingual cognitive ability. Further, it attempts to discover whether an online task is a suitable tool for studying RTs (as suggested by Reimers and Stewart, 2007). 100 individuals in three groups (monolinguals, bilinguals, and multilinguals) took part in the study. Each participant took two online RT tests, one of which required attentional control. Results show a trend for multilinguals to be faster at the attentional control task.

Northeast India has frequently been observed to be a contact zone for cultures and language groups (see Chelliah and Lester, 2014), a claim for which historical migrations and lexical borrowings have often been cited. More fine-grained analyses of potential borrowings of syntactic and conceptual systems, however, have yet to be done. The Khasian language family found in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya provides ample data for such analyses.
This group of languages belongs to the Austroasiatic phylum, but are separated from their closest relatives by Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages. Previous research has noted the similarity in formal realization between Khasian and Tibeto-Burman nominalisation strategies (Ring, 2014), but work on gender has not yet looked at potential language contact influence.
The combination in Khasian languages of gender markers (a feature of Indo-Aryan languages) and numeral classifiers (a feature of Austroasiatic languages) within the Noun Phrase is relevant here. One observation is that Khasian languages, situated geographically in Northeast India, exhibit the South Asian feature of gender as well as the Southeast Asian feature of numeral classifiers. Even more interesting, while surrounding Indo-Aryan languages (which inherited gender from Sanskrit) no longer require gendered NP agreement, Khasian languages do. And while most Austroasiatic languages have a large number of numeral classifiers, the numeral classifier system of Khasian languages is much simpler.
This talk outlines the 3-term gender system of Khasian languages and the system of numeral classifiers. These features are compared to neighboring and related languages that exhibit gender and/or numeral classifiers, with a view toward generating discussion of the possible role of language contact in contributing to these features.

References:
Chelliah, Shobhana, and Nicholas Lester. 2014. Contact and convergence in the Northeast. In The Field of Linguistics: South Asia, ed. Elena Bashir, Hans Henrich Hock, and K.V. Subbarao. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ring, Hiram. 2014. Nominalization in Pnar. Mon-Khmer Studies 43 (ICAAL 5):16–23.