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Title:
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Echo Words in Tamil
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Author:
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Elinor Keane
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sjoh0535/
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Oxford
, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
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Degree Date:
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2001
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Morphology
Phonetics
Phonology
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Subject Language(s):
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Tamil
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Director(s):
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John Coleman
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Abstract:
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Echo words are characteristic of colloquial speech throughout the Indian subcontinent. They exhibit segment-changing reduplication: the introduction of fixed segments to a repeated string or reduplicant. A Tamil example is maaTu kiiTu, formed from the base maaTu 'cow' and meaning 'cattle in general'. This thesis establishes the phonetic, phonological and morphological properties of such formations in Tamil, and investigates the consequences for theories of reduplication. Chapter 1 surveys developments in theoretical treatments of reduplication in general and segment-changing reduplication in particular. A new 'dual description' analysis is proposed, in which the reduplicant is defined by two descriptions, one the full description of the base, the other a partial description of the reduplicant, which can specify both prosodic structure and fixed segments.
Chapter 2 defines echo words in relation to other types of reduplicated expression, and reviews what is known about their properties in other Indian languages, including results of some original research on Hindi. Chapter 3 reports on the morphological constituency of Tamil echo words, from the responses of native speakers to a questionnaire. This was designed to explore which lexical categories can be echoed, the interaction of echoing with inflection and compounding, and the possibility of echo phrases. Acoustic analysis was used to investigate prosodic structure by considering stress placement and the distribution of different obstruent realizations. Chapter 4 provides the first experimental confirmation of differences in vowel quality and duration that can be associated with stress on an initial syllable, and concludes that the echo words bear a single stress.
The final chapter applies the dual description model to the Tamil data, and discusses how the phonological, morphological and syntactic aspects of echoing can be synthesized. In particular, the significance of phrasal echoing is discussed, not only for theories of reduplication but also the structure of the grammar.
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