WORKSHOP
on

The Semantics of Tense and Aspect in Indian Languages (STAIL1)
@ 26th SALA organised by CIIL, Mysore and Kannada University, Hampi.
19th-21st Dec. 2006

(STAIL2)
Organised by Department of Linguistics
University of Delhi
23rd – 31st January 2007

Formal Studies in the Syntax and Semantics of Indian Languages (FOSSSIL) apart from holding annual Spring/ Autumn School on syntax/ semantics, conducts at least one major workshop every year. In 2007, we initiated two workshops on the Semantics of Tense and Aspect of Indian Languages (STAIL1 and 2) in co-operation with various Linguistics institutes/ universities in India. The topic has been of much interest to semanticians, syntacticians, computational linguists, and typologists alike but one, on which there is no coherent and usable theoretical/ empirical consensus so far. The workshops were geared towards reporting some initial findings in this domain for Malayalam, Hindi, Bangla, Nepali, Khasi, Manipuri, Assamese, Oriya, Ao, Persian, Eke Gussi, Indian Sign Language and Sindhi. Although there have been some work (by some of the scholars mentioned below and others) on the Syntax/ Typology of the Tense/ Aspect system of these languages, there has been very little work on the semantic aspect of Tense/ Aspect. The workshops intended to remedy this situation to some extent by working on these languages and arrive at some definite conclusions to help predict the line of research for other languages as well.

The workshops were guided by Rajesh Bhatt of the University of Massachusetts and the panel included KA Jayaseelan (CIEFL, Hyderabad), Tanmoy Bhattacharya (University of Delhi), Ayesha Kidwai (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi), Hany Babu M. T. (CIEFL, Hyderabad), and Tista Bagchi (University of Delhi).

The following material were distributed during the workshops:
1. TMA questionnaire by Osten Dahl
2. Reichenbach Revisited by Sten Vikner
3. Tense and Aspect in Urdu by Miriam Butt
4. Aspect: An overview by Bhatt and Pancheva
5. Perfect by Bhatt and Pancheva

The purpose of the STAIL wikispaces is to continue discussing some of the issues raised during, especially, STAIL2 at University of Delhi. As a beginning, we invite members to submit short notes on data discussed during the workshop at Delhi with the hope that these will generate more discussion.

Workshop Email: workshop@fosssil.in
Next workshop: Indefinites