Periodic Reporting for period 3 - LINGUINDIC (Linguistics from India: new ideas for modern linguistics from ancient India)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-02-28
The LINGUINDIC project aims to uncover lost insights and analyses from the ancient Indian linguistic tradition, to compare and interface these with current work in modern linguistic theory, and thereby to develop new analyses and theoretical approaches within modern linguistics. The ancient Indian linguistic tradition was highly sophisticated and has influenced the development of modern linguistic theory in particular ways, but a wealth of linguistic literature, particularly from the later period, remains almost entirely uninvestigated from a linguistic perspective.
We have read widely in the relevant literature, and have identified a number of texts and portions of texts which we have subjected to detailed investigation and analysis. We have particularly focused on the linguistic phenomena of negation, argument structure, case marking and compounding. We have written or are in the process of writing a number of articles on these topics, and on new editions of some of the texts we have been working with.
We have already made significant advances in the linguistic understanding and analysis of the ideas proposed in the later Indian grammatical tradition, particularly with reference to negation and argument structure. As the project progresses, our focus will shift more towards the interface with modern linguistic theory, and we expect to develop new ways of looking at these and other linguistic phenomena through this.