Phonetics And Phonology Of The Saraiki Language: A Descriptive Exploration And An Analysis From The Perspective Of Optimality Theory

The current study is the first comprehensive description of the phonetics and phonology of the Saraiki language.It aims to analyse some morphophonological processes in the language in the framework of Optimality Theory.Saraiki is one of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Pakistan.It has six main varieties,spoken in different regions of Pakistan,with the majority of speakers in the southern Punjab province.This study is a description of the ‘central variety',spoken in the D.G Khan district,an area of southern Punjab.Linguistically,this is the first study of phonological and phonetic aspects of Saraiki.Earlier studies on Saraiki are based on prose,poetry and grammar,and on the acquisition of English by Saraiki speakers.The present study is designed to evaluate different linguistic aspects of the language,with as a secondary objective to introduce this language to the linguistic world for further study.Since there is hardly any previous literature on Saraiki in the field of linguistics,data was collected from native speakers from daily conversation in formal and informal speech styles.To gain insight into the finer details of its phonetics,some native-speaker data were also recorded under laboratory conditions.Phonetically,it is proved that Saraiki has 41 consonants and 15 vowels,on the basis of the data from native speakers.The consonants and vowels both present an oral-nasal contrast.One unique characteristic of Saraiki is that it has four implosives,which are rare in the world's languages and absent in other languages in this language family,except for Sindhi.On phonological ground,we investigate that Saraiki has five way laryngeal contrast in plosives.Different phonological issues related to Saraiki phonology are examined in this dissertation.Some phonological processes only receive brief attention while others(like metathesis and reduplication),are more comprehensively discussed.Besides segmental phonology,some supra-segmental aspects such as syllable structure and stress are carefully discussed.With respect to supra-segmental,Saraiki has a rather simple basic syllable structure,but also some interesting properties,such as a syllabic consonant /r/ that is only realized after dental plosives.Saraiki is quantity sensitive and has a trochaic stress system.The incorporation of loanwords(e.g.from Urdu,Arabic and from English)in Saraiki is analysed in a separate section.Of interest in this regard is that the treatment of loanwords is totally different from the native phonology.In order to analyse the phonological data,an Optimality Theoretic(OT)approach is used.One purpose of using the OT approach is to evaluate how OT stands up in the light of new data.One complete chapter is devoted to an introduction to constraint based phonology,with special attention to constraints that play a role in Saraiki phonology.In general,it seems that the data can be well described under an OT approach.In some situations,OT faces challenges,however,just like in other languages.I present some tentative ways in which the OT theory can be further improved,based on the Saraiki data.In the phonetic analysis,contrasts among different phonemes are presented with the help of oscillograms and spectrograms.Differences in vowel quality,length and diphthongization are illustrated by way of examples and phonetic displays.In the final chapter,a number of areas of possible future research in Saraiki phonetics and phonology are discussed.