Volume 12, Issue 1

Various Dravidian languages show a crosslinguistically unique form of negation in which a verb stem is directly followed by a suffix marking person, number and gender (PNG), with no tense, aspect or mood (TAM) marking and no overt negative marking. As these forms contrast with affirmative finite verb forms in the same languages with a TAM marker between the stem and PNG, this construction is generally referred to as “zero negation”. In the present study we propose a development of zero negation in Dravidian which is both intuitively appealing but also compatible with the attested historical developments. Critically, we argue that the zero negative in Dravidian derives from a tenseless category which denotes a state or a habitual or iterative event, and that this construction was originally employed as a deferential avoidance strategy for negation.

The current paper is a description of clausal juxtaposition and coordination in Assamese from a cognitive linguistics point of view. An IA language, Assamese is the major and the official language of Assam, a northeastern state of India. The paper shows how the grammar of clause-linking in Assamese is finally shaped by how we understand and conceptualize the relation between (two) real-world situations as expressed by clauses or sentences as the grammatical counterparts of situation. Usually we conceptualize situations as connected (e.g. If you drink this, you’ll die ) and hence clause-linking. This paper focuses on juxtaposition and coordination in Assamese as two means of clause-linking and observes that where conceptual connections are obvious, the two clauses are simply juxtaposed rather than coordinated with a coordinator that explicitly expresses the connection. Clausal juxtaposition and coordination in Assamese have hardly been studied in detail, except for the few pages devoted to the topic in Kalita, Jagat, C. (2019). Adhunika Asamiya Byakaran (Modern Assamese Grammar). Guwahati: LBS Publication, a traditional grammar of Assamese. The current paper can thus claim to be the first ever attempt at a detailed study of the topic from a modern linguistics perspective.