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26T H SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGE ANALYSIS CONFERENCECentral Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore 19th-21st December, 2006 |
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Atreyee Sharma University of Delhi, Delhi |
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The 26th Annual International Conference of South Asian Language Analysis (SALA), jointly hosted by the Kannada University, Hampi and Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore was held from 19th-21st December 2006 in the premises of CIIL. Prof. Harish Trivedi of English Department, University of Delhi delivered the inaugural talk. The papers, about 100 in number, consisting of topics from various fields such as computational linguistics, phonology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language teaching, etc. were presented by both the Indian and the foreign linguists presented in over 37 sessions during the conference.
Five plenary talks were delivered between 19th-21st Dec. by Prof. Pandharipande (“Transformation and authentification of the language of Hinduism in the US Diaspora: the role of mystics and the media”), Prof. Bh. Krishnamurthy (“The Aryans and the Dravidians”), Prof. Y. Kachru (“Language in social and ethnic interaction: The South Asian context”) and Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee (English in uneven world). Prof. U.N. Singh, the Director of CIIL introduced the New Linguistic Survey of India (NLSI) in his plenary talk.
One of the important events of the SALA conference was the STAIL (Semantics of Tense and Aspect in the Indian languages) workshop, held on all the three days of the conference and led by Rajesh Bhatt of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The workshop included classes, discussions, group work and presentations. A booklet containing “The TMA (Tense, Mood and Aspect) questionnaire by Osten Dahl, “Reichenbach Revisited” by Sten Vikner, and “Perfect” by Bhatt and Pancheva was distributed as background material of the workshop.
The languages focused on during the workshop included Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Oriya, Kannada, Malayalam and Telegu. The TMA questionnaire was discussed by the different language groups and the results were presented by the groups on the concluding day (for further details visit http://stail.wikispaces.com). The panel of the workshop included KA Jayaseelan (CIEFL, Hyderabad), Tanmoy Bhattacharya (University of Delhi) and Ayesha Kidwai (JNU, New Delhi). The conference was concluded on the 21st of December at 4.30 pm with the Valedictory session presided by noted Indian playwright and actor, Girish Karnad.
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