LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

Ramblings on my academic ambling through LISSIM(s)

Paroma Sanyal
Assistant Porfessor, Central University of Karnataka, Gulbarga

 If I were cornered into categorizing myself, I would probably have to confess that I am a phonologist. That is, most of my contributions to the academic world have been within the domain of “surface” representations. Nevertheless, I have attended two of the previous LISSIMs (LISSIM1and LISSIM2), been a fixture at most of the SCONLI’s held so far, and hobnobbed (almost always academically) with syntacticians and semanticists far more than phonologists. Through this essay, I plan to trace my academic journey through LISSIM1 and LISSIM5, in order to rationalize how I (mis)fit in with the group of fellow aspiring syntacticians and semanticists.

 At LISSIM1 I was in the second year of my PhD. I had finished my course work, written and presented 4-5 papers on the vowel phonology in Bangla, and according to many, should have just put them together and submitted my thesis. I didn’t. I wasn’t satisfied. Primarily because I had a bunch of WHATs answered, but not the WHYs and HOWs. In fact it was being suggested that these might be beyond the disciplinary boundaries of phonology. Luckily for me, and thanks to Prof. Jayaseelan, I happened to have a fair base in syntax. This helped me get into LISSIM1. Of all the teachers at LISSIM1, two stand out for me, for fairly different academic reason.

 Noami Erteshic-Sher’s classes, and the book (then in its manuscript form), opened up a new world of possibilities. I knew that both phonologists (many of my friends in EFL-U were working on information structure prosody) and syntacticians looked at informations structure. However, Noami had a handle on how to combine both approaches productively. It opened up the interface between syntax and phonology for me.

 A couple of years later I would go on to make the claim that -while homophony is common and usually tolerated, it becomes an issue when neither syntax and information structure are unable to disambiguate them- in the fourth chapter of my dissertation. This was based upon empirical evidence from Bangla where verbs inflected with the second person habitual (kAr-e), were not allowed to “merge” with the conjunctive particle (kor-e). I further contrast it with Greek, where in the transition between Classical to Modern, the language allowed paradigmatic neutralization due to homophony, merging the accusative, genitive and dative (hēmas , hēmōn, hēmin => mas) but blocking the same between 1^st person and 2^nd person plural.

 My other vivid memory in LISSIM1 is of Ian Roberts. This was primarily from a methodological perspective. He had a grand narrative on passives for which he needed to postulate a syntactic head. I was familiar with others who had postulated similar syntactic head positions as and when they needed it for theory internal reasons. So, that wasn’t new. He went to argue for the necessity of this position from all possible angles, showing that the passive was perhaps just one of the instances where this position was getting utilized. Irrespective of whether you buy the actual theory or not, you stand impressed by all the different angles from which he was approaching the theoretical point, all the little narratives he was weaving into the fabric of the grand narrative. In LISSIM5, I revisited this same methodological thrill in the classes of Zeleco Boskovic.

 I attended LISSIM 5 more than a year after the submission of my PhD thesis. When I applied, I must confess, I was primarily interested in Michael Starke and Nanosyntax. It was opening up a new perspective on possibilities on analyzing “clubbing together” of morpho-syntactic heads under the same phonological form (a new way of looking at what was our earstwhile homophony). To be honest, I still like the fresh perspective that Nanosyntax brings in, but I was somewhat underwhelmed by both Michael Starke as an academic and his methodology.

 For me this time Zeleco Boskovic and Norvin Richards were the stars. With Zeleco, like Ian, I learned more from the manner in which the content was organized and presented. In those few classes I can definitely say I grew as a teacher. Theory was not abstract and out of reach, and that itself was motivation enough for us to sit up night after night arguing about NP and DP. The disciplinary methodology of quantifying a theoretical hypothesis by means of these “tests” was something that I took with me.

 Like Noami, Norvin’s classes had resonance with questions I was pondering about. What is the impact of syntactic bracketing on prosody? So, this was right up my tree. For quite some time I had been planning to work on the prosodic and syntactic correspondence of focus structures in Malayalam, with Ayesha, and this gave me the starting point. In the subsequent months following LISSIM, I re-analyzed the Malayalam recordings in the light of Ayesha’s syntactic analyses (with Hima joining in) and vice-versa. It’s an ongoing work on an interesting interface between syntax and phonology where we are using empirical and theoretical cues from one domain to dig deeper into another.

 I would have substantially mentioned Utpal Lahiri’s “Akomike” and “Utekan” as well, but for the fact that I attended the one week workshop on Semantics that he gave for us in Hyderabad and NPIs for me somehow belongs to the Hyderabad register rather than Kangra.

 To sum up, LISSIM for me has been an enriching experience as a researcher in Linguistics, as a teacher on pedagogic practices in language sciences, and above all a means of interacting with my fellow researchers with the unregulated opportunity to pick on their fertile brains. So, I submit my application for yet another LISSIM, with the hope that the perpetual “fly on the wall” looking into the concerns of syntacticians and semanticists might get yet another visa to do the same.

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