A descriptive analysis of the dudhnoi dialect of assamese

Abstract

The Introduction is preceded by the acknowledgements and the table of contents. It comprises a discussion on the geolinguistics of the Dudhnoi Dialect, the scope of the study and the theoretical model adopted and a very brief description of a few earlier works on the Assamese language. Chapter- I discusses the segmental phonemics of DD. This is preceded by a section on the notational conventions used in the thesis. Chapter- II analyses the distribution of the phonemes in intraword positions -- initial, medial and final. It exhibits the distributional constraints of the different phonemes. Chapter- III is devoted to the discovery of the allophones with phonetic descriptions thereof. Chapter- IV is a study on the DD syllable structure. Chapter- V explores the word-stress patterns and intonations of simple sentences. Chapter- VI postulates the largest grammatical unit -- the sentence and subcategorizes DD sentences into various types and sub-types in terms of speaker-hearer relations and grammatical characteristics. Chapter- VII describes the grammar of sentences in terms of clause compositions. Chapter- VIII classifies words into the Major/Full/Autosementic and Minor/Structural/Functional/Grammatical ones. Full words are further subclassified as belonging to the different word-classes. The syntactic behaviours of structural words have been discussed. Chapter- IX is a constituent structure analysis of Noun phrases and Verb phrases. Chapter- X comprises morphological analysis of words in terms of morphemic compositions correlatable to the inflectional and derivational categories. Chapter- XI constitutes a comparative/contrastive linguistic study between the Standard Dialect of Assamese and the Dudhnoi Dialect at the various levels/sub-levels. Chapter- XII is concerned with the linguistics of dialect contact -- (a) between the Standard Dialect and the Dudhnoi Dialect, and, (b) between the Dudhnoi Dialect and the contiguous dialects. It also explores the phenomena of borrowing, code-switching and diglossia.