SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Chapter 1; INTRODUCTION: A brief introduction of the land, language, people and their occupations and society are presented. The historical, political divisions of the land, influence of other languages on Telugu, and the caste system that exists in Telugu society are explained. The controversy that exists between the traditional school and the modern school in the fields of education and language policy is touched upon. A survey of earlier work on different aspects of Telugu phonology is given at the start of each chapter. This is followed by my own analyses in terms of prosodic phonology. Chapter 2: TELUGU PHONEMIC SYSTEMS: A review of previous accounts of the Telugu phonological system is given and it is shown how each system proposed is inadequate in the circumstances that obtain in the Telugu language today. Chapter 3: SYLLABLE STRUCTURE AND STRESS: Stress plays an important role in Sandhi, harmony and rhythm. Word stress is dealt with in this section. Syllable structure is treated along with stress so as to account for loss of syllables, syllable weight and so on. Problems related to social dialects are offered a solution. Chapter 4: COMPOUND WORDS AND RHYTHM: Scholars have grouped reduplicative forms, onomatopoeic forms and echo words together with compound noun forms. A new classification of these forms, on the basis of phonetic, phonological and semantic criteria is attempted in this section. The rhythm of compound words is described here. Chapter 5: HARMONY: The prosodic treatment of vowel harmony will be seen to be not only more economical but also more complete than previous analyses, i.e. it will cover many nominal and verbal suffixes hitherto unexplored. Chapter 6: SANDHI: The term Sandhi is used loosely for various kinds of morphological processes. An attempt is made to show how Telugu scholars gave different interpretations to the Sandhi phenomena. A phonetic-phonological classification of the processes is made and Sandhi rules are presented in terms of prosodic phonology. Chapter 7: REGIONAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTS - PROBLEMS OF STANDARDISATION: Speakers are able to choose among alternative linguistic means, any of which would satisfactorily communicate the propositional information. Selection among these alternatives defines the social situations. The question of standardisation is considered. Phonological systems in terms of prosodic theory are presented so as to account for differences between regional, social dialects and the 'standard' language. Chapter 8: CONCLUSIONS: The major findings of the thesis are summarized and discussed.