Some Aspects of Long Distance Anaphora in South Asia
James W. Gair
Cornell University
South Asian languages show a number of interesting phenomena in their anaphoric systems , which have only to a limited extent entered into the literature. A NSF funded Workshop was held in Delhi, India(1995) on anaphora in South Asian Languages. It involved the analysis and description of anaphoric systems in 14 South Asian languages, presented by specialists in these languages, according to a common, detailed protocol. Thanks to that Workshop, and to the volume developed from it, which will soon appear, we now have detailed, principled , and closely comparable data from these languages, which share for the most part a number of typological features, but belong to several different families and areas.
These languages differ, despite their typological similarity, in
important respects such as agreement, complementation, and case
marking, all of which have been argued to interact with anaphoric
systems. They also show a variety of anaphoric types, both in
morphological character (simple and complex), but also in their
associated domains. In particular, they characteristically show long
distance anaphora; some of them also exhibiting an anti-local
anaphor. This paper will be based primarily on material from this
volume, but will concentrate primarily on one subset of languages of
Southern South Asia, namely in Indo-Aryan, Sinhala, and in the
Dravidian languages, mainly Tamil and Malayalam.; but it will draw
selected comparisons to other languages of the wider area. The basic
questions to be addressed concern the interaction of morphological
complexity, agreement, verbal reflexivity and binding domain.
Lust, B., Wali, K., Gair, J. and Subbarao, K.V. (to appear).
Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Some South Asian Languages.
Mouton-De Gruyter.