The language whose phonology is described in this work is standard Hindi, i.e., the Hindi used in everyday casual speech by educated native speakers in cities such as Varanasi, Lucknow, Delhi etc., which is different from highly Sanskritized Hindi called literary style Hindi and highly Perso-Arabicized Urdu, a native speaker being one who has learnt the language as his first language.

The author's interest lies in accounting for the Hindi speakers competence i.e., providing evidence for the psychological reality of certain sound patterns of Hindi. This study is a mixture of two types of evidence. Some evidence is provided from experimental data and other is from hypercorrection, from children's mistakes, from native speakers, reactions to certain forms. The model used is that of generative phonology with modifications suggested throughout.

The work is divided into six chapters. The first chapter deals with the segments of Hindi that need to be recognized as phonemes. Chapter 2 deals with current morpheme structure theory, and some suggested revisions of it. Chapter 3 discusses the 'abstractness' issue. Chapter 4 gives a detailed account of the initial, medial and final clusters of Hindi, and gives the if-then sequntial constraints necessary to account for these. Chapter 5 has two parts, the first discussing the problem of nasalization in Hindi and the second dealing with the issue of homorganic nasals in Hindi. The sixth chapter discusses the e-deletion rule in Hindi.

About the Author:

Manjari Ohala (Ph.D., University of California at Los Angels) is an assistant professor in the Linguistics Program at San Jose State University. She has published several articles on Hindi phonology and phonetics in Journals such as Language, Lingua, and Indian Linguistics.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER

1. Segments and features
   1.1 Discussion of segments included or excluded
   1.2 Feature specifications
   1.3 Some tentative segments structure conditions
2. Theory of sequential constraints
   2.1.   Morpheme structure conditions: their origin and purpose
   2.1.1 Psychological reality of MSC's
   2.1.2 On what does a speaker base his reaction to new morphemes?
   2.2.   The domain of MSC's
   2.2.1 The data
   2.2.2 Various analyses of such data
3. Psychological evidence for the lexical representation of certain medial clusters
   3.1 The data
   3.2 The abstractness issue
   3.3 A pilot experiment
   3.4 The main experiment
4. Sequential constraints
   4.1 Hindi consonant clusters
   4.2 The variant pronunciation of certain clusters
   4.3 Sequential constraints of consonants
   4.4 Constraints on Vowel sequences
5. Nasals and nasalization
   5.1.1 Historical development of nasalized vowels in Hindi
   5.1.2 Nasalization of a vowel due to inflectional processes
   5.1.3 Nasalization due to phonological processes
   5.1.4 Traditional analyses of nasalization
   5.1.5 Recent analyses of nasalization
   5.1.6 Conclusions
   5.1.7 Nasalization of vowels due to phonetic processes
   5.2.1 Nasal plus stop clusters
   5.2.2 Various plus stop clusters
   5.2.3 Proposed treatment of these exceptions
   5.2.4 Where the constraint on nasal + stop homorganicity belongs in a grammar
6. The e-deletion rule
   6.1 The basic environment of the e-deletion rule
   6.2 Morpheme boundaries in the environment of the e-deletion rule
   6.3 The application of the rule within morphemes
   6.4 The right-to-left application of the e-deletion rule
   6.5 The application of the e-deletion rule in the environment of consonant clusters
   6.6 Some sociolinguistic determinants of the e-deletion rule
   6.7 Summary
   6.8 Phonetic correlates of e-deletion
   6.9 The historical development of the e-deletion rule
   6.10 Deletion versus insertion of schwa
   6.11 Other accounts of the e-deletion rule

1. The Problem of aspiration in Hindi phonetics
2. Experiment on the psychological reality of some initial cluster constraints
3. Examples of consonants clusters

INDICES

Author Index
Subject Index
Language Index

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