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Article: Analysis to Synthesis: The Development of Complex Verb Morphology in the Dravidian Languages.
- Article from:
- The Journal of the American Oriental Society
- Article date:
- October 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 American Oriental Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It is a great pleasure to review a book on Dravidian (Dr.) linguistics that is highly original, thought-provoking, witty and, what is more, marks a great advance in the development of the subject. Its author sets out to analyze the genesis of synthetic verb forms in the Dr. languages through the process of compound verb contraction. He has succeeded in showing very convincingly that contraction provides the best and the most economic explanation of the development of synthetic verb forms from analytic forms, by creating a paradigm of historical evolution that utilizes formal and functional attributes of both earlier and later forms.
The first chapter, entitled simply ...