Jayaseelan K. A. - Dravidian Syntax and Universal Grammar

Richard Kayne, General Editor

Movement and Silence

Richard S. Kayne

Restructuring and Functional Heads: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 4

Guglielmo Cinque

Scrambling, Remnant Movement and Restructuring in West Germanic

Roland Hinterhlzl

The Syntax of Ellipsis: Evidence from Dutch Dialects

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck

Mapping the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 5

Edited by Paola Beninc and Nicola Munaro

Mapping Spatial PPs: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 6

Edited by Guglielmo Cinque and Luigi Rizzi

The Grammar of Q: Q-Particles, Wh-Movement, and Pied-Piping

Seth Cable

Comparisons and Contrasts

Richard S. Kayne

Discourse-Related Features and Functional Projections

Silvio Cruschina

Functional Heads: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 7

Edited by Laura Brug, Anna Cardinaletti, Giuliana Giusti, Nicola Munaro, Cecilia Poletto

Adverbial Clauses, Main Clause Phenomena and Composition of the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 8

Liliane Haegeman

Variation in Datives

Edited by Beatriz Fernndez and Ricardo Etxepare

Locality

Edited by Ian Roberts and Enoch Aboh

Aspects of Split Ergativity

Jessica Coon

A Comparative Grammar of Borgomanerese

Christina Tortora

Cross-Linguistic Studies of Imposters and Pronominal Agreement

Edited by Chris Collins

Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Mamoru Saito

Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English

Edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn

Functional Structure from Top to Toe: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 9

Edited by Peter Svenonius

Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective

Edited by Edited by Y.-H. Audrey Li, Andrew Simpson, and W.-T. Dylan Tsai

The Architecture of Determiners

Thomas Leu

Beyond Functional Sequence: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 10

Edited by Ur Shlonsky

The Cartography of Chinese Syntax: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 11

Edited by Wei-Tien Dylan Tsai

Argument Licensing and Agreement

Claire Halpert

Rethinking Parameters

Edited by Luis Eguren, Olga Fernndez-Soriano, and Amaya Mendikoetxea

Deconstructing Ergativity: Two Types of Ergative Languages and Their Features

Maria Polinsky

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jayaseelan, K. A., author. | Amritavalli, R., author.

Title: Dravidian syntax and universal grammar : Jayaseelan-Amritavalli papers / K.A. Jayaseelan, R. Amritavalli.

Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2017] | Series: Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax

Identifiers: LCCN 2016025663 | ISBN 9780190630225 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190630249 (updf) | ISBN 9780190630256 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Dravidian languagesSyntax. | Dravidian languagesGrammar, Comparative. | Generative grammar.

Classification: LCC PL4604 .J29 2016 | DDC 494.8dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025663

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan and R. Amritavalli

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

R. Amritavalli

R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli and Deepti Ramadoss

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

R. Amritavalli and K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

R. Amritavalli

K. A. Jayaseelan

R. Amritavalli

R. Amritavalli

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan

K. A. Jayaseelan and M. Hariprasad

The papers included in this volume are a selection from the work on Dravidian done by the two authors over the last thirty yearsthe earliest paper here is dated 1984.

A brief introduction to Dravidian may be useful to readers who are unfamiliar with this group of languages. The Dravidian languages are spoken principally in southern India. But there are a few isolated Dravidian languages in the sub-Himalayan belt, and one has been discovered in Pakistan. Altogether 26 languages have been counted. But the principal Dravidian languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. These four languages, each with its own writing system and long literary traditionthe Tamil literary tradition dates back to 500 BCE or earliercurrently have millions of speakers, and are sometimes referred to as the major Dravidian languages. These are the languages that figure in this volume.

There are typological descriptions of these four languages, which the reader who wishes to have an over-all picture of any one of them may wish to consult: Krishnamurti and Gwynn (1985) (Telugu), Lehmann (1989) (Tamil), Sridhar (1990) (Kannada), Asher and Kumari (1997) (Malayalam). For information about the geographical spread of the Dravidian languages, a list of these languages, speaker statistics, and the proto-history of Dravidian, the most accessible source is Krishnamurti (2003). A principled typology of just the anaphoric systems of the above-mentioned four principal languages can be found in Lust et.al. (2000). A useful bibliographical tool for the Dravidian scholar is Ramaiah (19942005), a six volume bibliography of Dravidian languages and linguistics.

The papers in this volume are grouped into sections under five thematic heads. We now give a brief indication of the main concerns of these sections, reserving a more detailed discussion of them to the mini-prefaces that we give at the beginning of each section.

A commonly noted typological feature of the Dravidian languages is that they are head-final but that they otherwise have free word order. We deal with free word orderalways foregrounded in typological accounts of Dravidianin the papers in Section I of this volume. But we do not go along with a claim which has sometimes been made, that these languages have no neutral word order. Instead, the emphasis is on some hitherto unnoticed semantic properties of Dravidian scrambling. These are then related to parallel facts regarding non-canonical word orders in some OV languages of Europe; and we proposeas a result of these cross-linguistic comparisonswhat we hope is a deeper explanation of this phenomenon in terms of the universal functional architecture of the clause.