When we agreed to publish a volume on the Structure of Telugu Phrases, authored by our former colleague, Prof. K. Viswanatham, he was still in service. As we all know, there have been some important studies on Telugu verbal bases and other morpho-syntactic aspects of Telugu, but getting a whole volume where in different chapters, the author would deal with Noun Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Verb Phrase and Adverbial Phrase makes the task of language teacher easier. Perhaps, many of our Telugu linguists have been waiting for someone or the other to write it but none was willing to spend so much time and care for the new researchers and teachers in the field, in the midst of numerous other academic commitments. KV has had probably a thought of doing something like this, useful for both linguistics as well as Telugu language and literature students for a long time, and this comes now as his wish-fulfilment. The perspective has, of course, been made very clear from the author's end, in case we want to know for sure about his angle of looking into it, we need to go into his detailed introduction.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the author would begin from the basics in this 370 plus page book with seven chapters. One would, however, immediately notice that the book is written within a particular theoretical framework, and the author has devoted some attention to highlighting that aspect also. He has identified the challenges before the Telugu linguists that exist today. An introduction to the field such as this will lay the foundations of language teaching at CIIL and elsewhere. How doing purely esoteric linguistics is different from writing a solid description can be best exemplified by this book.
The best part of the book is that it has a very good reading list for those interested in phrasal studies of Dravidian languages in its Bibliography section as well as in the description that go very well with the text.
I sincerely hope that this book will be well-appreciated by scholars and students of languages and linguistics and also by those who specialize in comparative philology and Dravidian studies.
Much work is not found on Telugu, especially in English medium from the modern linguistic view point particularly in the area of grammar. The existing grammars in Telugu or even in Sanskrit, are more traditional, and most of them took traditional Sanskrit grammars as their model in analysing and interpreting various aspects of Telugu grammar. All these grammars have taken the classical or epic language used in traditional writing for centuries as corpus and analysed. Even in the later period, say, from the beginning of the 18th century, the Telugu grammars written by Western grammarians starting from Father Bessethat Beschi (1707) and also by Indian grammarians represented more or less the high-flown written language termed the grandhikabha:sa (language of books) thus maintaining a diglossic situation though some efforts were made by some to use the spoken language, as these grammars were intended to serve a pedagogical purpose. The Telugu used by A.H. Arden in his A Progressive Grammar of the Telugu Language (1873) is a mixture of both the written and the spoken varieties.
Although it is generally believed that A Grammar of the Telinga Language (1814) of William Carey is the first Telugu Grammar written by a Western scholar (See 1.1.5,p.2) there were four other grammars before him. The very first one is Father Beschi's Grammar composed by Father Bessethat Beschi in 1707 which is not available today. Later, Benjamin Schlze, a Danish missionary wrote Warugian Grammar in the year 1728 which was printed in 1747 in Germany, Schize also wrote a Telugu grammar in Latin entitled Grammatica Telugica in the same year. This was printed in Madras (Chennai) in 1728 and it is the first printed Telugu grammar. This grammar consists of eight chapters namely Script, Pronunciation, Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, Verbs, Inflections and Syntax. In this grammar Telugu script symbols and sentences are transcribed in Roman script and the equivalents are given in Latin. It appears that there was also a Telugu grammar by name A Grammar of the Gentoo Language (1807) by an unknown Author.
Research on modern or spoken Telugu started only after the Western linguistic theories were adopted to Indian languages. Incidentally, this is the time when more and more scholars recognised the importance of spoken Telugu and some universities allowed students to write examinations and submit doctoral work in standard spoken Telugu especially during the late 1960s. Consequently, writings in prose and poetry gained more and more prominence in spoken Telugu and found place in school and college curricula.
We are aware that not much work has been brought out from the modern linguistic point of view although considerable research has been done, and not much published material is available to researchers and students although there are some books and monographs available on historical linguistics, basic phonology, and on word and sentence structure. On phrases, though there are research papers published here and there, especially on noun phrase, there is no consolidated work brought out so far. This book as I hope will fill that gap. Further, the Indian grammatical tradition does not specify phrase as a level in the grammatical hierarchy like the Western linguistic tradition. The phrase, especially the noun phrase goes under compounds, the verb phrase under verb and so on. In this book the grammatical level in the hierarchy below clause and above word is treated as phrase.
The layout of this book is based on tagmemic conceptual frame work. Though the basic principles are tagmemic it is more descriptive in nature and pedagogical in presentation intending that the book would be more useful to the users both researchers and learners of Telugu even if they do not know tagmemics. I hope this will fulfil my desire. This book was preceded by my Ph.D dissertation entitled A Study of the Structure of Telugu Phrases which formed the basis for this work.
I have to thank many people who helped me in my endeavour in bringing out this book. First of all, I convey my gratitudes to Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) for expediting the bringing out of this book which was pending for a long time in the press. My gratitudes are also due to Prof. M.S. Thirumalai, the former Deputy Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages who was the guide to my Ph. D. dissertation for encouraging me to revise it and for arranging for its publication by CIIL. I also thank the Manager of the CIIL Printing Press, the Research Assistant publications Dr. K. Srinivasacharya and the other staff of the Printing Press for their help. I also convey my sincere thanks to the compositor Smt. B. Shobha Rani Govinda for meticulously and efficiently typing, page making and making the press copy of the book ready. I also thank the CIIL Artist Sri. H. Manohar for making a beautiful cover design. Finally, my thanks are due to my wife for having readily assisted me in proof reading at times of need.
All efforts are made to bring out the book without typographical and spelling mistakes, but still there may be a few here and there, especially in the examples for which I express my sincere regrets.
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