Modern Kannada Grammar

Modern Kannada Grammar

By- S.N. Sridhar

Kannada, one of the major languages of the Dravidian family, is spoken by over 40 million people, mainly in the state of Karnataka, South India, where it is the official language. It is one of the twenty-two languages recognized by the Indian Constitution. It has a rich literary tradtion going back to the ninth century, and exhibits a complex pattern of sociolinguistic and stylistic variation, marked, in part, by a thorough assimilation of Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit, Prakrit. Hindi-Urdu, etc.) and more recently, English elements.

The present descriptive grammar gives a detailed and sophisticated account of the standard language, drawing on the insights of traditional structuralist, and generative linguists, and on the author’s own extensive research. Keeping the needs of both the theoretician and the descriptivist in mind, the work gives a lucid explicit and in many cases original account of
the major and minor structures of the language in syntax, morphology, and phonology.
A valuable feature of this grammar is the author’s consistent attempt to relate formal and functional aspects of the language. Although the variety described is the standard literary variety (because of its greater morphological transparency), the forms of the colloquial
varieties are continuously referred to, and the examples convey the flavour of spoken idiomatic Kannada. With its descriptive rigour, range of phenomena covered, wealth of examples,
and ethnographic insights, this volume is the most current, comprehensive, and authoritative description of modern Kannada to date.

The book will interest students and researchers in the areas of linguistic theory, descriptive linguistics, language typology, comparative/contrastive linguistics, language contact and convergence, and South Asian linguistics as well as translation and Kannada language and literary studies.

S.N. Sridhar is Professor of Linguistics and India Studies and Director of the Center for India Studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He has also served as Founding Chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at the State University of New York. Stony Brook. He received B.A. (Honors) and M.A. degrees in English Literature and Linguistics from Bangalore University and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Professor Sridhar has conducted extensive research in bilingualism (language contact and convergence), sociolinguistics (code-switching, code-mixing, language modernization, language spread), second language acquisition in non-native settings, structure and functions of India English and other World English’s, teaching English as a second language, descriptive
linguistics (reference grammar of Kannada), theoretical linguistics (syntax of dative subjects, morphology of agglutination, level ordering, productivity), psycholinguistics (cross-linguistic experimental study of cognitive universals of sentence production), applied linguistics
(scope and relation to linguistic theory), and history of linguistics (contributions of the Indian grammatical tradition to linguistic theory).

ISBN  81-7304-767-1    2007   378p.   Rs.395/ pounds 28.99

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