Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics 2009

Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics 2009. Ed. by Rajendra Singh. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs 222.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. Pp viii, 249. ISBN 9783110225594. $140 (Hb).

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics (ARSALL) is an annual series that replaced The yearbook of South Asian languages and linguistics in 2007. The current volume, the third issue, has three papers as ‘General contributions’, one invited paper as a ‘Special contribution’, three ‘Reports’, five ‘Reviews’, and two ‘Dialogues’.

Drawing examples from English and Bangla, Probal Dasgupta presents the notion of intersecting economies within the substantivist program, which permits multiple characterization, and manages the coexistence of isolated irregular forms with the rest of the system, noting the failure of formal theories to explain such forms. Peter Hook and Prashant Pardeshi attempt to create a taxonomy of idiomatic EAT-expressions in Marathi through the notions of correspondence and alternation. They examine their power to reshuffle roles, increase transitivity, and add vividness and salience to the expression. Arguing for emergent unmarkedness against the notion of default unmarkedness, Shakuntala Mahanta analyzes exceptional triggering of morphologically induced vowel harmony in both nominal and verbal morphology of Assamese within the optimality theory framework, and explores the theoretical precept of locality in exceptionality. Michael W. Morgan’s ‘Special contribution’ attempts to place Indian sign language (ISL) in a wider typological and areal perspective, focusing on the encoding of core verbal arguments to classify 250 ISL verbs.

In ‘Regional reports’, Fida Birzi discusses the birth of a new pidgin called Pidgin Madam, born out of the linguistic contact between colloquial Sinhala and Lebanese Arabic (the substrate language). Kazuyuki Kiryu and Prashant Pardeshi report on research on South Asian languages in Japan between 2000 and 2008. Andrew Hardie, Ram Raj Lohani, Bhim N. Regmi, and Yogendra P. Yadava examine the morphosyntactic categorization scheme employed for tagging within the recently completed Nepali National Corpus.

The repetition of many previous authors in this volume works against the ARSALL series’ stated purpose of becoming a general forum for linguists working on South Asian languages. While the contributions in ARSALL2009 are important in themselves and useful for anyone interested in these languages, a wider participation of linguists would make the series more vibrant and better representative of the various dimensions of linguistic inquiry pursued in and about the Indian sub-continent.