The Indo-Aryan languages provide us with a rich and continuous historical linguistic record for over three thousand years. But a large amount of this record, especially for the Middle Indo-Aryan and Early New Indo-Aryan period, remains unexplored linguistically. This project will contribute to filling this gap by undertaking an investigation of the nature of the linguistic transition from the Late Middle Indo-Aryan period to the New Indo-Aryan period (500 CE--1500CE). Dr. Ashwini Deo's research will focus specifically on studying the evolution of tense, aspect, and modality systems in the New Indo-Aryan languages.
This research builds on two subprojects. The first subproject aims to digitize a set of diachronic texts created between 500CE and 1500CE, thus creating an electronically accessible and searchable corpus for the period of interest. The second subproject involves taking a closer look at the contemporary linguistic situation for under-documented members of the Central and Southern subgroups of Indo-Aryan for clues about the structure of the parent Middle Indo-Aryan system. Undertaken in concert, these two methodologically distinct, but thematically unified subprojects will yield a picture of the Indo-Aryan historical situation of much higher resolution than either of them undertaken in isolation. Further, these data will be crucial to answering broader theoretical questions about the systematic nature of semantic change, the mechanisms of change, and paths of evolution in tense/aspect systems in natural languages.
The project aims, from the very outset, to create a platform for making the processed textual and field data (metadata) accessible to the broader research community via a dedicated website. A sizeable corpus of electronic texts as well as a comprehensive bibliographic database of material on Middle and New Indo-Aryan will be made publicly available. Further, a complete archive of documented materials will be maintained for the fieldwork done. The intellectual infrastructure generated by the project can be thus employed more generally for future research on Middle and New Indo-Aryan.
This award is co-funded by NSF's International Science and Engineering office.
