Particles in Modern Malaysian Tamil: A Syntactico - Semantic Study

This book Syntactico-Semantic Study of Particles in Modern Tamil by senior Indian linguist Dr. K. Karunakaran and his Malaysian co-author Dr. R. Krishnan is a very significant contribution to the study and understanding of Tamil. Professor Karunakaran and Dr. Krishnan are well-known scholars in Dravidian Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics. This book will help us explore further the use of Tamil in the above fields and will help teach and use Tamil meaningfully.

Tamils all over the world should feel grateful to the University of Malaya for their support to Tamil Studies for more than 50 years. The leaders of the Department of Tamil Studies in the University of Malaya helped foster scientific research of Tamil even as they encouraged the Tamils to cultivate love for their mother tongue. This book Syntactico-Semantic Study of Particles in Modern Tamil once again reveals the dedication of the scholars of the University of Malaya to the scientific study of Tamil.

I sincerely thank our Hon'ble Chief Minister Dr. J. Jayalalitha, who is also the Chairman of the International Institute of Tamil Studies for his able guidance to Tamil Studies and his kindness towards Tamil Scholars.

Language is a well organized system and this system has been described by making use of structural theories and concepts of different kinds. A grammatical description usually takes into account parts of speech and this includes word classes such as nouns, pronouns, verbs adjectives, adverbs, etc. Most of these word classes participate in inflectional and derivational processes. The parts of speech as mentioned above show grammatical relationships with one another whenever they occur in phrases and sentences. Such relationships help us to understand and interpret the sentences and discourse in an explicit way as far as possible. However, there is a group of words or forms which occur with different kinds of parts of speech to convey meaning or make one to understand the phrase or sentence without any ambiguity or problem. All such forms have meaning but that meaning is assigned based on the occurrence of such forms with different parts of speech. So, many of the definitions given for this kind of category explain particle as an uninflected item which has grammatical functions but does not clearly belong to one of the major parts of speech.

**Contents and Sample Pages**