Theoretical Perspectives on Word Order in South Asian Languages

This volume presents a collection of papers on word order variation in the languages of South Asia. These languages are interesting precisely because they exhibit such great flexibility in their word orders while not being completely non-configurational; and data from these languages have been the source of much recent research and controversy in this domain. The papers in this volume bring together both theoretical and empirical perspectives on word order variability within a wide variety of South Asian languages. They contribute particularly to a fuller description and understanding of the phenomena. They examine the extent to which linear precedence relations (word order) are determined/constrained by lexical, discourse, or purely syntactic levels of organization; and to what extent they represent an independent system of organisation with its own language-particular constraints and relations.

Miriam Butt is professor of theoretical and computational linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Tracy Holloway King is university lecturer in general linguistics at the University of Oxford and fellow of Linacre College Gillian Ramchand is a senior researcher at CASTL and a professor at the University of Tromsø.

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