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Literature Review
The study of speech sounds is subdivided between two but related disciplines-
Phonetics and Phonology. Both the term comes from the Greek word meaning ‘sound’.
The boundaries between phonetics and phonology are very difficult to draw as the
discipline rely on each other to a large extent, in the sense that phonological analysis has
to be grounded in phonetic facts, and phonetic fact have to be geared towards these
capacities of the human vocal tract which sub serve language specifically (Ladefoged
1982. Catford1977).
Lass (1984) define Phonology as “concerned with the function, behaviour and
organization of sound as linguistic items” i.e. the sound that are found in a particular
language. Phonetics is ‘the study of sound themselves in the physical world’; the physical
world being comprised of fields like physical, anatomy, neurology and psychology of
human beings.
Phonetics and phonology are both concerned with the same subject matter or
aspect of language, speech sounds, as the audible result of articulation but, they are also
concerned with them from different points of view. Phonetics is general (i.e. concerned
with speech sounds as such without reference to their function in a particular language),
description and classificatory; Phonology in particular (having a particular language or
languages). Phonology has in fact been called functional phonetics.
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It is the task of Phonology to study which differences in sounds are related to
differences in meaning in a given language, in which way the discriminative elements are
related to each other, and the rules according to which they may be combined in words
and structures.
2.2.1Structuralism:
The main work on structuralism was at the level of Phonology especially in the
Prague school led by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson. The Prague school is basically
associated with its phonology and with its phonological relevant functions. In fact, the
distinction between phonetics and phonology is associated with the Prague Linguistic
Circle. Trubetzkoy represents the essence of Praguian Phonology. Trubetzkoy’s
posthumously published work, “The Principles of Phonology” (1939), is considered the
foundation of the Prague School of Phonology. Trubetzkoy chiefly contributed to
Phonology and Phonological theory. He made the distinction between Phonetics and
Phonology by taking into account the criterion of function. In separating phonetics from
phonology and phoneme from sound, Trubetzkoy adopted the Ferdinand de Saussure’s
distinction between langue and parole. He defined the ‘phoneme’ as “the smallest
distinctive unit within the structure of a given language”, and he linked the concept of
neutralization with the distinction marked/unmarked. According to his theory when two
phonemes are distinguished by the presence or absence of a single distinction feature one
of them is marked and the other is unmarked. One of the major contributions of
Trubetzkoy in the field of Linguistics is the description of Morphophonology.
Trubetzkoy formulated three main tasks:
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b. To formulate rules for transforming morphemes in morphemic combinations;
and
c. To create a theory of morphological sound alternation.
Another important figure in the Prague School was Roman Jakobson, who was
considered as one of the most prominent linguist of the twentieth century. It was
Jakobson and Trubetzkoy who initiated the modern distinctive feature theory. Distinctive
feature theory, based on his own work and the work of Trubetzkoy, was first formalized
by Roman Jakobson in 1941 and remains one of the most significant contributions to
phonology.
Bloomfield (1933), Pike (1947) and Hockett (1955) are some of the prominent
American Structuralists. For the American structuralist as for Bloomfield, a language
was basically a hierarchy of inventories; an inventory of phonemes which could be
concatenated to form morphemes, which could be combined to form words and syntactic
constructions, which themselves formed further inventories. American Structuralist
Phonology was concerned primarily with formalizing the notion of the Phoneme, and
with elaborating a framework for the phoneme analysis of languages. For Bloomfield, the
phoneme was not an ‘ideal sound’ or ‘mental image’ but rather a bundle of distinctive
features which are present in the overt, physical manifestation of speech. The task of
phonemic analysis is to isolate these distinctive features- principally through the
discovery of minimal pairs- and to state the distribution of redundant, non-distinctive
features. Bloomfield (1933), was one of the most noteworthy early practitioners of
morphophonemic’s method of description. The concept of morphophonemics in
Linguistics was discussed elaborately by Bloomfield, and it is still relevant in current
linguistic analysis.
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Representation (UR) which encodes all the information about the pronunciation of a word
which cannot be predicted by rule. This undergoes phonological rules which substitute
one segment or alter the order of segments. The result is Surface Representation (SR).
The SPE had a great influence on phonological theory with its downplaying of the
syllable and the focus on segments.
Natural phonology was a theory developed by David Stampe in 1969 and (more
explicitly) in 1979. Rather than acting on segment, phonological processes act on
distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a
syllable or as large as an entire utterance. The basis of the theory is the claim that our
innate phonetics capacity can be represented in the form of a set of very general natural
processes. In addition to natural processes, languages are also assumed to contain
learned Rules. Natural phonology thus attempted to produce an account of “everything
that language owes to the fact that is spoken” (Doneger and Stampe 1979:128), and to
“exclude the topic of unmotivated and morphologically motivated alternations” (ibid., P.
127) such as German Umlaut or English velar softening.
The above discussion does not cover all the sources consulted. In the description on
the phonology of Sangtam no particular theory was followed. However, wherever
applicable, Bloomfield’s view on the concept of phoneme, Pike’s phonemic analysis,
and, the concepts of syllable introduced by Hockett are taken into consideration for
analysis.
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2.3 Morphology:
Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. Somewhat
paradoxically, morphology is both the oldest and one of the youngest sub- disciplines of
grammar. It is the oldest because, as far as we know, the first linguists were primarily
morphologist.
This is also the reason why it was only in the second half of the nineteenth
century that the term morphology was invented and became current.
Morphology is not only the study of the forms of words of a given point of time
but it also studies the form of words used over a period of time. Thus, it can be said that it
studies the words synchronically and diachronically.
Inflectional affixes signal grammatical relationships, such as plural, past tense and
possession and do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are
attached. Derivational affixes changes the grammatical class of morphemes to which they
are attached. Inflectional affixes will inflect tense, aspects modality and mood in the
grammatical category like verb. Person, number, gender and case will be inflected in the
nouns.
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2.3.1 Structuralist Model (Hockett)
This is the clearest of Hockett’s model. This model took the morpheme as its
basic unit – ‘morphemes’ including roots, inflections, derivational affixes, and so on.
These items form what is called the surface structure. Hockett discusses the ablaut in the
formation consisting of affixation of -ed to the basic form (as bake - baked). He points
out that descriptive linguistics up to that time had a variety of means for describing the
fact that took is the past tense form of take, and proceeds to compare them.
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This citation is self - explanatory expect for the term portmanteau, which means a
type of fusion of two morphemes into one. All of these solutions have their draw backs.
But the option Hockett seems to prefer is that of (iv), though he explicitly denies that.
This means that the form take is comprised of /t…k/ plus an infix /ey/. However, this
preference is relative to IA theory. As Hockett points out, in a different theoretical
framework we would expect different solutions to be favoured. Hockett mentions one
other approach in passing the word- and -paradigm theory, and devotes much of his
discussion to what he sees as the main alternative to IA, the item-and-process (IP) theory.
Bol'sh
omu
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forms to express the separate categories of masculine/ neuter, dative, singular and
adjective.
Not much detail about WP theory was given by Hockett .This is an approach to
inflectional morphology, first presented in an articulated form in Robins (1959), and
defended meticulously within a generative framework by Matthews (1974). Robins
pointed out that there are certain generalizations, which can only be stated at the level of
the whole word. His proposal was to revamp a much earlier tradition of word analysis
derived from classical grammarian (Some writing 2,500 years ago, such as Panini and
Aristotle) describing classical languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
The key to the WP approach is our notion of the morphosyntactic word. Each
inflected form (at least) one morphosyntactic description (e.g., past tense form or dative
singular of the masculine/neuter adjectival form) and the grammar then makes available
paradigms that specify the formatives which correspond to these categories. In an
agglutinating system the correspondence rules will be rather simple, one amounting to
one morphosyntactic category per formative and one formative per category.
The Item- and - arrangement (IA) Theory and the Item - and - Process (IP)
Theories are fundamentally agglutinating theories and are therefore relevant for
typologically agglutinating languages. Sangtam being an agglutinative language the two
theories are found to be suitable for the analysis of Sangtam morphological processes.
Nida is of the opinion that a descriptive analyst must be guided by “very fixed
principles” in order to be accurate and objective in the description of the language.
Language change is an attested fact of all human languages, but the rate of change varies
at different times in the history of a language.
5
Nida Eugene A. 1949.”Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of Words”
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Nida states that “the science of descriptive linguistics should be concerned with
structural relations in any and in all languages” (P.4). Hence, according to Nida,
whenever the existing terms are applicable, they should be used.
The fundamental principles for linguistic description listed by Nida (1949) are:
a. Descriptive analysis must be based on what people say, i.e., the primacy of spoken
over written language, and the necessity to record what people actually say, not what
they should say.
b. The forms are primary and the usages secondary, i.e., a descriptive linguist should
start with the form, and then describe the grammatical position in which the forms
occur.
c. No part of a language can be adequately describe without reference to all other parts,
i.e., phonetics, morphology and syntax of a language can be describe with reference
to each other.
d. Language are constantly in the process of change, i.e., there are fluctuations in the
use of alternative forms (e.g. proven vs. Proved).
Nida while dealing with Morphology and the descriptive analysis of words puts
forward six important principles for the identification of morphemes. These six principles
have provided basic guidelines to field linguists dealing with morphological analysis
especially those working on “unknown”, undescribed languages.
Example:
Principle 2: “Forms which have a common semantic distinctiveness but which differ in
phonemic forms (i.e. the phonemes or the order of the phonemes) may constitute a
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morpheme provided the distribution of formal differences is phonologically definable.”
(Example: s~z~iz) which is phonologically definable.
Principle 3: “Forms which have a common semantic distinctiveness but which differ in
phonemic form in such a way that their distribution cannot be phonologically defined
constitute a single morpheme, if the forms are in complementary distribution.”
Principle 4: “An overt formal differences in the structural series constitutes a morpheme
if in any member of such a series, the overt formal difference and a zero structural
difference are the only significant features for distinguishing a minimal unit of phonetic-
semantic distinctiveness” (P. 54).
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above have been followed for this study. But under the fundamental principle c the
syntax of Sangtam has not been analyzed.
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differences found in the lexicon. In other words, comparison of differences (which define
words), especially segmented differences are exploited in more than one pair of words. In
this way, WWM identifies word-based morphological relations in a lexicon. In the
WWM, the structuralist, multipartite analysis into root, stem, affix, etc gave way to
analysis of morphological relationships. Secondly, word formation strategies (WFS)
based on generalizations from known facts, are used in the production and understanding
of new words.
2.4 Case:
The western tradition of describing case systems can be traced back to the
Greeks. The nouns of Greek and Latin were classified by traditional grammarians
according to particular paradigms of declension for the inflectional categories of case in
number.
According to Lyons (1968: 289) the origin of case goes back to the Latin word
‘casus’ (and the Greek word which translated) which means ‘falling’ or ‘deviation’. Lyon
further explains that it was the Stoics who gave to the word ‘case’ the more particular
sense that it has since borne in grammar terminology. Case was the most important
inflectional categories of the nouns, as tense was the most important inflectional category
of the Verb.
Blake (1991) defines case as “a system of marking dependent nouns for the type
of relationship they bear to their heads.” The verb is taken to be the head of the clause,
since it largely determines what dependent may be present.
In traditional grammar, the term case refers to the inflectional marking. Case
marks the relationship of a noun to a verb at the clause level of a noun to prepositions,
postposition or another noun at the phrase level. Case in traditional grammar, therefore is
viewed primarily in morphological perspective.
Lyons (1968: 295) points out that in many treatments of the case inflections
found in various languages as distinction is drawn between their ‘grammatical’ and their
‘local’ functions. The distinction is sometimes formulated in terms of an opposition
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between the more ‘Abstract’ (grammatical) and the more ‘concrete’ (local) functions that
have been recognized in the description of many languages. Further, these ‘grammatical’
and ‘local’ functions may be realized in the same language partly by case – inflections
and partly by other means – most commonly by preposition or postposition, or by word -
order. Lyons view on the case system will serve as a background to configure the case
system or the case marking in Sangtam.
The traditional model for describing case system is based on Ancient Greek or
Latin. Ancient Greek, like the other Indo - European languages was fusional inflecting
languages which case marking could not be separated from case marking, where there
was also some fusion of the stem and inflection. Cases were described in terms of what
were called case forms, where a case form is an inflected form of a noun. The term case
is from Latin ‘casus’ which is the translation of the Greek ‘Ptosis’ ‘fall’. The term
originally referred to verbs as well as nouns and the idea seems to have been falling away
from as assumed standard form, a notion also reflected in the term ‘declension’ used with
references to inflected classes.
Case systems of the type represent by Latin and Ancient Greek present two
major problems for description. One is the problem of distinguishing the cases; the other
is the problem of describing their meaning and function. Distinguishing the case is a
problem, since different classes of stem exhibit a different range of distribution, i.e., the
paradigm are not isomorphic. The traditional solution is to identify across stem classes on
the basis of the functions they have in common. Describing the meaning and function of
the cases traditionally involved a principle meaning, which is reflected in the level, as
well as listing a range of separate meaning or functions.
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2.4.2 The Distributional Approach:
In Latin as in many Indo – European languages, the nominative and the accusative
have distinct case forms for masculine and feminine nouns, but there is neutralization or
‘syncretism’ of distinction with neuter nouns. There is also neutralization of nominative
and accusative with plural nouns. The distinction applies to all nouns, since it allows
making generalization about the form used for various functions in various syntactic
contexts. However, there is one point overlooked in traditional description and that is
pattern of syncretism. In a language like Latin, they may seem random at first, but two
syncretisms predominate. There is the syncretism of nominative and accusative in all
neuters and all plurals and the syncretism of dative in all plurals plus the singular of the
second declension and the i-stem in the third declension.
The origin of the generalized meaning goes back to the classical period, but it
becomes prominent in the thirteenth century both in the work of the Byzantine
grammarian Maximus Planudes (1260 -1310) and in the work of the Scholastic
grammarian (Hjelmslev 1935, Serbat 1981) where, generalized characterizations were
exploited in presenting inventories as systems. Simon of Dacia (Denmark), for instance,
characterized the Latin genitive and ablative as expressing origin as opposed to the dative
and accusative which express what is called destination. A cross - cutting, distinction is
made between relations of substance to action i.e., adverbial relations (Serbat 1981).
These binary distinctions can be represented in terms of distinctive features.
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2.4.3 Modern Approach:
Since the early sixties, Linguistics has been dominated by the theories of
Chomsky. His influence can be seen even in works outside the Chomskyan framework.
Among them are ‘case grammar’ of Fillmore (1974), the ‘Relational Grammar’ of Perl
mutter and postal and the Lexical Functional Grammar of Bresman. These theories have
been provoked by Chomsky’s theoretical approach and have advanced over the last few
decades. These theories maintain that all the mechanisms observed by the traditionalists
may be used to signal case; that, case is abstract existing independently of the means of
expression and that it is universal.
Fillmore is responsible for positing the notion that there is a universal set of
atonics semantic roles. In his paper, ‘The case for case’ (1968), he proposed a set of six
‘cases’ which are agentive, instrumental, dative, factitive, locative and objective, but he
later switch to agent, instrument, object, source, goal, place and time. He called these as
‘Syntactic Semantic Relations’ cases and his conception of grammar and its congeners
came to be referred to as case grammar. These Fillmorean type cases are usually referred
to as Deep cases and the traditional cases as surface cases.
S – Intransitive subject
A – Transitive subject
O – Transitive object
On the basis of the above characterization of subject and object, languages are
classified into two broad categories, such as
1. Nominative-Accusative and
2. Ergative-Absolutive
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In languages with a nominative-accusative grammar, S (intransitive subject) and
A (transitive subject) are grouped together, with regard to the case marker i.e. nominative
case, however languages of the ergative-absolutive type would classify S (intransitive
subject) and O (transitive object) together (i.e. case-marked with same case form-
absolutive) and the A (transitive subject) is case marked with an ergative case. The
description of different kinds of treatment to the subject in different languages can be
summed up in a diagram given below:
Nominative
A ergative
s
Absolutive
o
If we elaborate the above diagram, we would say the nominative-accusative
languages fall on the left hand side of the diagram and the ergative-absolutive would fall
on the right hand side; meaning, the subject of both +/- transitive clauses will be case
marked as nominative in the languages that are known as ‘nominative-accusative’, and if
there is an object in case of transitive clause it is case marked with accusative case
(covert or overt). On the other hand side, the ergative-absolutive languages mark the
subject of intransitive clause and the direct object of a transitive clause with zero case
marker which is also known as absolutive form of nominative case. However, the subject
of a transitive clause gets a different case and that is what is termed as ergative case.
Nominative-accusative case systems can be illustrated for English:
a. Intransitive Subject (S)
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‘The baby cries’.
In the above examples 1 and 2, we find that the subjects of intransitive clauses i.e.
‘boy’ and ‘baby’ respectively appear in nominative case. The nominative case shows up
in null (or zero) case form in English.
b. Transitive Subject (A)
3. The boy hit the dog
Art. N.3MS-Nom Verb-pst. Art. N.3MS-Acc
‘The boy hit the dog’.
6
Itziar Laka, A Johns et al. (eds.), Ergativity, 173-195, 2006: with some unification of glossing.
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7. emakume-a-k ogi-ak ja-n d-it-u
woman-Det-Erg. bread-Det.Pl eat-prf. 3Agr-Pl-have-3Erg.
‘The woman has eaten (the) breads’.
Example 5 has a transitive verb in imperfective aspect where the subject
‘emkume’ (the woman) carries ergative case (morpheme-k). The direct object ‘ogi’
(the bread) receives an absolutive case which is marked by zero. In 6, the subject
‘gzteri’ (the youth) functions as an agent of the transitive verb ‘uz-’ meaning ‘leave’.
Thus the subject is marked with an ergative case marker ‘–k’ and the direct object
‘pilotA’ (the ball) is zero case marked which stands for absolutive case. Example 7 shows
that a transitive verb in perfective aspect would take a subject that occurs with an ergative
case and the direct object bears zero the case marker which again stands for absolutive
case.
Some similar examples from Dyirbal7, spoken in north-east Australia are
illustrated below:
DYIRBAL: OSV
a. Intransitive Subject (S)
8. baji jaɽa walmanju
NCl.there.ABS man.ABS got up
‘Man got up’.
7
Dixon, the Dyirbal language of North Queensland, 1972
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From the above Basque and Dyirbal examples, we could say that the pattern of
ergativity is displayed in these languages as it has been advocated by Dixon (1994). What
this means is that once the transitivity of the clause changes, the marking of subject will
also change. This change of ergative and nominative case with regard to the subject is
across the tenses, aspects and the phi- features (PNG) of the subject in Basque and
Dyirbal. So, such system of ergative case marking is referred as full-ergative system.
However, there are languages in which the ergativity is not marked with the subject
across the board, and thus are parameterized for various conditioned to be marked with
the subject. This system, since gets separated from the full ergative system, is known as
split-ergative system.
2. iʔ haʔʧi -kʰɔ
1st SG sneeze PS.T
‘I sneezed.’
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the situation changes when we have a transitive clause. Below are some examples of
transitive clauses in different tenses.
b. Transitive Subject (A) in present, past and future simple:
From the above examples 4 to 6, that the subject is overtly case marked unlike the
example 1 to 3 of intransitive clauses. The case suffix /-nǝ/ occurs uniformly with the
subject when the verb is in transitive. The Direct Object is however unmarked and this
reflects the pattern of ergativity in Sangtam. This pattern fulfills the requirement for
ergativity that Dixon proposes.
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From the above examples 7 and 8 we can see that the subjects of transitive verbs
are overtly case marked with an ergative case suffix ‘-nǝ’ in perfective aspect. The
ergative case marker in Sangtam is uniformly present in all different transitive clauses.
From the above examples we can say that Sangtam seems to display a pattern of ‘full-
ergative’ system that has been proposed by Dixon.
More details on case markers have been discussed in Chapter 5 (5.3).
2.6 Works on Sangtam
Grierson “Linguistics Survey of India” (VOL III PART II 1903), conducted over
a hundred years ago is the first work ever done in Sangtam. A brief list of words and
sentences are listed which are said to have been collected by Captain A.E.Woods, I.S.C.,
and Deputy Commissioner of the Naga Hills District. Grierson did not give any
description on the words and sentences which he listed. Grierson has mentioned about
this language by the name “Thukumi”8. Grierson (1903) states, “the Thukumi call
themselves Isachanu-re. Thukumi is a sema9 term......their villages are small. The Ao’s
call the tribe Sangtamra.”
8
Tukhumi was the Sema name for the central Sangtam.
9
Presently called Sumi. It should be noted that ‘Sema’ is still commonly used in Nagaland to refer to this
group.
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Part of the Sangtam Bible was published for the first time in 1944, the New
Testament was first published in 1963 and the complete Bible was finally published in
the year 1995.
Apart from Grierson’s word list, so far, no linguistic work has been done in
Sangtam. This research work “The Phonology and Morphology of Sangtam” is a first of
its kind. Since this is the first linguistic work on the language, the researcher did not take
into account any particular theory or approaches; the discussion and analysis provided is
mainly descriptive study.
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