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The paper undertakes the eco-spatial re-reading of two Malayalam movies, Kumbalangi Nights (2019) and Malik (2021), using the framework of solastalgia. Solastalgia is an environmental philosophy developed by Glenn Albrecht that refers to the feeling of abandonment and isolation in relation to a drastically transformed spatial circumstance. It is the paradoxical sense of homelessness while still being home. The paper argues that solastalgia is a heuristic framework to analyse unjust geographies and reimagine them as forums for creative resilience, collective strength, and political action. The movies explore the ramifications of lived space on the life of people living in it and its coalescing with other social, political, and economic categories of injustice. Kumbalangi tells the story of four brothers living on a stranded island in the neighbourhood of a city and how they creatively resist the solastalgic distress caused by the neoliberal social order. Malik, set in a densely populated coastal village, delineates how solastalgia is instrumental in excessive criminalisation and breakage of the social fabric. The discussion of the movies seeks to show how cultural narratives such as films can be seen as important tools to represent unjust geographies, and resist them through rebellious re-imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic provides an opportunity for filmmakers to identify the potential of the limited space. The pandemic-driven perspectives of the filmmakers widen the horizon of space beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions. Malayalam films have responded to the unprecedented and shocking outbreak of COVID-19 faster because space and its utilization have been always minimal in the industry. People have been shattered in isolation and the new normal imparted new phrases and idioms to the language of life. The desire to socialize, the angst to stay and work at home, the issues of parenting, and the financial crisis have all become part of the new normal. To narrate any kind of story has appeared challenging because the pandemic is an amalgamation of anxieties and it demands to be faithful to all the unfortunate situations of life while featuring it. Thus, the idea of shifting from the physical space to the psychological space progressed and it paves way for extraordinary films with brilliant performances. This paper is an attempt to explore the documentation of the pandemic in Aarkkariyam, a 2021 mystery drama and Joji, a crime thriller. The paper focuses on the many facets of the pandemic like psychological trauma, isolation, work from home, social and financial instability, and the change in the dynamics of ‘home’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text classification is one of the primary NLP tasks where machine learning (ML) is widely used. Even though the applied machine learning models are similar, the classification task may address specific challenges from language to language. The concept of model explainability can provide an idea of how the models make decisions in these situations. In this paper, The explainability of different text classification models for Malayalam language, a morphologically rich Dravidian language predominantly spoken in Kerala, was compared. The experiments considered classification models from both traditional ML and deep learning genres. The experiments were conducted on three different datasets and explainability scores are formulated for each of the selected models. The results of experiments showed that deep learning models did very well with respect to performance matrices whereas traditional machine learning models did well if not better in the explainability part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on agrammatism, primarily associated with nonfluent aphasias like Broca's aphasia, characterized by omission of function words and inflectional affixes, leading to telegraphic utterances. Topics include hypotheses explaining agrammatism, including phonological deficit, syntactic deficit, and lexical-semantic deficit, and aims to study agrammatic deficits in Malayalam-speaking Broca's aphasics.

In Kerala, Malayalam is the mother tongue of most people. However, the dialects spoken by the primitive tribal communities in Kerala are numerous. Each tribal community has its language and literature. Different mother tongues are there in a school when different sections of children come to school. According to modern linguistic theory, this problem needs an essential solution. With the formation of the linguistic states, in the Malayalam speaking territory bordering other states (Tamil Nadu and Karnataka), the languages of these states is continued to be used. There are educational institutions for students belonging to the linguistic minority communities. These schools protect the right to learn and learn through minority languages. The situation in the Kasaragod district is a bit more complicated. There are officially Malayalam and Kannada medium schools in the district. But in Kasaragod, which is known as “saptha bhasha sangama bhoomi” -nationally recognized languages such as Tulu, Konkani, Marathi, Hindustani, and Byari, Havyaka, Arakannada, and other dialects are also used for communication. Tulu is a part of the unique culture of Kasaragod and the most spoken language after Malayalam. But there are currently no facilities available for children to learn in their mother tongue. They fail to make achievements in academics; they are not able to mingle with Malayalam or Kannada mother-tongue students, feel shy and less social with other children. There is gap between school and family culture, and there is lack of school resources in Tulu language. Lack of empowered teachers significantly block their learning. The prevailing situation is the denial of children's right to learn in their mother tongue. They have adjustment problems with others in the school, they feel depressed, feel shy, feel alienated, disappointed, depressed, etc. To overcome these situations the teacher can help them to do education activities, listen to music, talk with friends, etc. The different discourse languages of them can’t be utilised to pursue education and this pushes them into feelings of alienation and consequent dropouts. Further it results in learning backwardness too, as reflected in behavioural issues associated with altering into truants, withdrawal from classroom activities, absence of response to the questions and the directions of teachers, poor performance in examinations and process of evaluation, etc. So, helping them to follow learning in their respective mother tongue is essentially the responsibility of our educational system. The oral culture and literature of such linguistic minorities appear to be splendid, particularly that of the Tulu language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on Malayalam Text-to-Speech (TTS) Conversion emphasizes its crucial role as an assistive tool for the visually impaired, addressing the challenges they face in accessing printed and digital content. By enabling synthesized speech, Malayalam TTS technology enhances accessibility and inclusivity, allowing visually impaired individuals to engage with digital content independently. The flexibility of Malayalam TTS, including language preference and pacing options, facilitates efficient information consumption for users. Its applications in education and professional environments illustrate its role in levelling the playing field for visually impaired individuals. However, challenges such as adoption and usability persist, necessitating improvements in TTS quality and compatibility, alongside efforts to promote accessibility standards. Ultimately, Malayalam TTS serves as a means of empowerment, providing equitable access to information and fostering personal and professional development for the visually impaired community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the complex and evolving portrayal of intimacy in Malayalam cinema, particularly through the lens of eco-theological settings and remote locations. Examining films from the 1970s to the present day, the analysis highlights how these narratives have employed problematic tropes to introduce eroticized content, often framing it within sacred spaces or remote landscapes to achieve a sense of forbidden allure and potentially mitigate audience disapproval. This paper contends that the ecotheological spaces depicted in Malayalam cinema are not neutral but laden with socio-cultural and gendered meanings. Examining intimacy within these spaces provides a unique vantage point for understanding how cinematic representations reinforce prevailing power structures, especially concerning gender dynamics. It prompts a deeper exploration of how ecological practices and spiritual beliefs intersect with notions of femininity and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the semantic and syntactic deficits in Malayalam-speaking children with learning disabilities. Topics include the prevalence of speech-language delay among children, long-term consequences of language impairment on school populations, and the comparison of language skills between children with learning disabilities and normal peers.

Abstract This article presents the research work on improving speech recognition systems for the morphologically complex Malayalam language using subword tokens for language modeling. The speech recognition system is built using a deep neural network–hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM)-based automatic speech recognition (ASR). We propose a novel method, syllable-byte pair encoding (S-BPE), that combines linguistically informed syllable tokenization with the data-driven tokenization method of byte pair encoding (BPE). The proposed method ensures words are always segmented at valid pronunciation boundaries. On a text corpus that has been divided into tokens using the proposed method, we construct statistical n-gram language models and assess the modeling effectiveness in terms of both information-theoretic and corpus linguistic metrics. A comparative study of the proposed method with other data-driven (BPE, Morfessor, and Unigram), linguistic (Syllable), and baseline (Word) tokenization algorithms is also presented. Pronunciation lexicons of subword tokenized units are built with pronunciation described as graphemes. We develop ASR systems employing the subword tokenized language models and pronunciation lexicons. The resulting ASR models are comprehensively evaluated to answer the research questions regarding the impact of subword tokenization algorithms on language modeling complexity and on ASR performance. Our study highlights the strong performance of the hybrid S-BPE tokens, achieving a notable 10.6% word error rate (WER), which represents a substantial 16.8% improvement over the baseline word-level ASR system. The ablation study has revealed that the performance of S-BPE segmentation, which initially underperformed compared to syllable tokens with lower amounts of textual data for language modeling, exhibited steady improvement with the increase in LM training data. The extensive ablation study indicates that there is a limited advantage in raising the n-gram order of the language model beyond $$n=3$$ n = 3 . Such an increase results in considerable model size growth without significant improvements in WER. The implementation of the algorithm and all associated experiments are available under an open license, allowing for reproduction, adaptation, and reuse.

This article presents the research work on improving speech recognition systems for the morphologically complex Malayalam language using subword tokens for language modeling. The speech recognition system is built using a deep neural network–hidden Markov model (DNN-HMM)-based automatic speech recognition (ASR). We propose a novel method, syllable-byte pair encoding (S-BPE), that combines linguistically informed syllable tokenization with the data-driven tokenization method of byte pair encoding (BPE). The proposed method ensures words are always segmented at valid pronunciation boundaries. On a text corpus that has been divided into tokens using the proposed method, we construct statistical n-gram language models and assess the modeling effectiveness in terms of both information-theoretic and corpus linguistic metrics. A comparative study of the proposed method with other data-driven (BPE, Morfessor, and Unigram), linguistic (Syllable), and baseline (Word) tokenization algorithms is also presented. Pronunciation lexicons of subword tokenized units are built with pronunciation described as graphemes. We develop ASR systems employing the subword tokenized language models and pronunciation lexicons. The resulting ASR models are comprehensively evaluated to answer the research questions regarding the impact of subword tokenization algorithms on language modeling complexity and on ASR performance. Our study highlights the strong performance of the hybrid S-BPE tokens, achieving a notable 10.6% word error rate (WER), which represents a substantial 16.8% improvement over the baseline word-level ASR system. The ablation study has revealed that the performance of S-BPE segmentation, which initially underperformed compared to syllable tokens with lower amounts of textual data for language modeling, exhibited steady improvement with the increase in LM training data. The extensive ablation study indicates that there is a limited advantage in raising the n-gram order of the language model beyond n = 3 . Such an increase results in considerable model size growth without significant improvements in WER. The implementation of the algorithm and all associated experiments are available under an open license, allowing for reproduction, adaptation, and reuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malayalam roots undergo two kinds of allomorphy in the context of past and non-past tense morphology: - (i) the inflectional tense affixes, and (ii) the verbal stems that select for said inflections. Contemporary accounts to theorise this distribution yielded little to no parsimony. Adapting Lieber's morpho-lexical rules to Malayalam, Madhavan's lexical model considers all the stems of word formation to be stored in the permanent lexicon, with the affixes subcategorising for their respective stems. Since this stem storage model of the lexicalist framework is not only expensive on the mental grammar but also fails to distinguish between the stem and affix allomorphy, this paper reanalyses the facts of the Malayalam tense under Distributed Morphology (DM). Two main characteristics of DM motivate the reanalysis of the Malayalam tense: First, unlike Lieber's lexicalist framework, the hierarchical configuration of the word is determined by the syntax and not by the subcategorisation frames of the affixes. This allows for the use of the same phonological form across syntactically different forms. Second, DM makes a clear distinction between the rules that trigger the phonological alteration of the affixes, namely Vocabulary insertion rules, and Readjustment rules. Readjustment rules are phonological in nature but also make reference to both the morpho-syntactic features and the identity of particular roots (Halle & Marantz, 1993). Thus, what was seen as arbitrary increments in the Lexicalist model on the stem could be reanalysed as different phonological changes applying to their respective lists of roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a computational study that examines people's opinions, attitudes, and opinions based on their written text. Keralites' mother tongue, Malayalam, is the most often used language to express themselves on Twitter. As there is no automatic Sentiment Analyzer in Malayalam, the SA of Twitter messages is necessary. In this research work, a Malayalam sentiment analysis model is introduced. The input raw data in the form of reviews are fed for the pre-processing stage. The pre-processing module includes sentence tokenization via Sandi Splitting and parts of speech (POS) tagging. Subsequently, Bag of Word, the Proposed weightage-based Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, Unigram with the dictionary and Unigram with dictionary including negation words have been considered for feature vector formation. Finally, the review classification is undergone via the proposed hybrid classifier, which is constructed by hybridizing the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), respectively. To enhance the classification performance, the weight of the CNN classifier will be fine-tuned via an Improved Bumble bee mating Optimization (IBBMO), which is an advanced version of standard BBMO. The performance of the proposed work is compared over other conventional models in terms of positive, negative, convergence, and other measures. The accuracy of the proposed method is 95.436, which is much better than the existing works like DBN = 86.25, NN = 87.080, SVM = 87.234, WOA+Hybrid Classifier = 88.440, LA+Hybrid Classifier = 89.35285, CSO+Hybrid Classifier = 92.021, BBMO+Hybrid Classifier = 93.4248, and ML techniques = 94.014, at the 90th training percentage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIM: To translate the orthodontic experience questionnaire into Malayalam, an Indian language, and assess its validity and reliability in the Kerala population. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The original questionnaire, which was developed in English, was translated into Malayalam. Face validity was assessed, and minor changes were made, followed by a content validity assessment by an expert panel. The final version was given to 324 patients who marked their responses on a Likert scale. Internal consistency reliability was tested using Cronbach’s alpha, and test‑retest reliability was tested using the intraclass correlation coefficient. Principal component factor analysis was performed to regroup the valid items. RESULTS: The principal component factor analysis revealed three domains. Reliability assessed by Cronbach’s alpha of the whole questionnaire was 0.799, and that of the three domains was 0.73, 0.71, and 0.71, respectively. The test‑retest reliability was found to be good (0.798). CONCLUSION: The Malayalam version of the orthodontic experience questionnaire was found to be content valid with good reliability. To obtain a successful treatment result, an orthodontist must be aware of these and this questionnaire, with adequate validity and reliability, has been designed to achieve this in the Malayalam‑speaking population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper primarily constitutes readings of two travelogues written in the Malayalam language in order to see how the image of the other evolves across narratives over time. My reading focuses on the dynamic and formative nature of the image of the other as it transcends the fixed theoretical positions and postulations. The image of the other presented in the event of reading could be better understood as a relational construction; which contradicts the essentialist claims made by theories about the identity of the other. The first travelogue Kappirikalude Nattil (1951) was one of the pioneering works of travel writing in Malayalam. Whereas the second book Sanchariyude Vazhiyambalangal (2018) presents a more nuanced and contemporary idea of travelling and exploration. To explore how the performance of travelogues in the event of reading contradicts the theoretical notions of the other, this paper contextualises the travelogues in the context of two theories related to othering. Those theories are Homi K Bhabha's 'mimicry', and Pierre Bourdieu's 'habitus'. Importantly, this paper exclusively focuses on the 'use' of these theories in literary readings, and therefore the sociological or psychological validity of these theories will not come under the scope of this paper. To expand the idea of 'self and other' dynamics as a 'relational construction', the paper incorporates Martin Buber's concept of 'I and Thou' and 'Levinas' ideas about the ethical approach towards the other. However, the paper does not intend to be an exploration of the intricacies in the philosophical and theoretical understandings of the other. Instead, it attempts a demonstration of how the theories of 'othering' work in the context of travel writings and how the philosophical understanding of otherness sheds light on the reading of travelogues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study on structural distribution of lateral consonants in Bangla and Malayalam for identifying the nature of mother tongue interference in case of lateral approximants in Bengali diaspora in Kerala. In Malayalam, there are two lateral approximants, which are phonemic in nature, [l] and [?]. While in Bengali, there is one phoneme [l] having three realisations as [l], [?] and [l?] which are allophonic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) in 2009 defines Intellectual disability. Topics include use of the AAIDD definition of Intellectual Disability where ASHA strongly urges the use of the term Intellectual Disability in the DSM-V, which would be consistent with the AAIDD definition; and delay hypothesis suggests that developmental sequence of speech and language is similar and the factors underlying are similar.

Within the field of speech language pathology several attempts at studying language disorders are seen in the past 3 decades. Studies have shown that more than 80% of children with intellectual disability (ID) show language delays and requires professional intervention (Subba Rao and Srinivas, 1989; Bharat Raj, 1987; Prabhu, 1968 and others, as cited in Selvi, K., 1999). CWID showed delayed development of syntax. The LARSP procedure has been adapted successfully to describe the language of CWID in Kannada (Kumaraswamy, 2021; Subbarao, 1995). The present study followed a similar methodology and described language (in terms of syntax skills) of Malayalam speaking CWID. The objectives of the study were analyzing their expression data on plural markers, PNGF markers and Case markers. The description of Malayalam spoken syntactic structures was obtained from two sources, namely Grammar of Malayalam (Nair, 2012) and Malayalam - Descriptive Grammars (Asher, & Kumari, 1997). 60 CWID (4-6 years MA) were studied using natural conversational samples using toys, play materials, pictures. Except regular plural markers, other plural markers (e.g., Suffix/-ar and/-mar//) were not well developed in either group of CWID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with Intellectual Disability (CWID) demonstrated an increased performance with increased MA. Higher MA (5-6 years) group produced more sentences per turn and longer sentence length than the lower MA (4-5 years) group. Thus, language performance can be predicted based on what is known about syntax at between 4 and 6 years. It was generally noted that the CWID group produced few spontaneous sentences, i.e., sentences other than what the adult stimuli required. This suggests the possibility that CWID have limitations in the cognitive processing of linguistic input which may occur at the point of decoding, encoding or both. Such difficulties in accessing or recalling information and availability of stored information have been noted previously in the ID population CWID showed delayed development of syntax. The LARSP procedure has been adapted successfully to describe the language of CWID in Kannada (Kumaraswamy, 2021; Subbarao, 1995). The present study followed a similar methodology and described language (in terms of syntax skills) of Malayalam speaking CWID. The objectives of the study were analyzing their expression data on transitives, intransitives, causatives, and sentence types. The description of Malayalam spoken syntactic structures was obtained from two sources, namely Grammar of Malayalam (Nair, 2012) and Malayalam - Descriptive Grammars (Asher, & Kumari, 1997). 60 CWID (4-6 years MA) were studied using natural conversational samples using toys, play materials, pictures. Transitives and intransitive verbs were used equally by CWID groups. Causative forms were used less by CWID groups. This is likely the result of causative forms used less frequently in spoken Malayalam variety of Malayalam sentence types were seen in CWID groups with comparable performance. Wh questions, adjectival use, declaratives were seen in all children. Interrogative sentence usage increased in the higher MA group indicating its developing nature. Generally, no complex sentence usage was observed. Syntax proved to be a difficult part of language performance in CWID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Learning to read is a complex process that involves phonological and orthographic processing abilities, broader language skills and cognitive processes across all writing systems. Although these components remain common, the pace of acquisition of phonological and orthographic processing and reading abilities differ across writing systems. Methods: This study aimed to understand the developmental pattern of reading and phonological processing, assess their interrelationship and study the predictors of reading ability among 175 children, learning to read Malayalam and attending Grades 1–3. They completed various reading (akshara reading, word and nonword reading) and phonological processing (rhyme recognition, syllable deletion, syllable segmentation, phoneme deletion, phoneme substitution, rapid naming and nonword repetition) tasks. Results: Grade and reading level‐based analysis was performed to collate the results. Results revealed a significant overlap of phonological processing and reading abilities among children in Grades 2 and 3. Reading scores demonstrated a weak‐to‐moderate significant correlation with the phonological processing tasks. Although skilled readers performed significantly better on all phonological processing tasks, their scores did not reach ceiling. Syllable‐level tasks were easier compared to phoneme‐level tasks, and they significantly predicted the reading abilities of children. Conclusions: The findings contribute to the existing body of evidence for akshara writing systems, specifically in Malayalam alpha‐syllabary. The development of phonological processing and reading in Malayalam extends beyond the third grade, and syllable processing contributed to increased variance in reading accuracy among inexperienced readers. Highlights: What is already known about this topic Crosslinguistic research evidence suggests a difference in reading acquisition patterns among different writing systems.Studies in akshara writing systems have demonstrated that akshara knowledge develops over time and a reciprocal relationship exists between phonological processing and reading abilities.Syllable‐level processing emerges earlier than phoneme‐level processing and predicts reading accuracy. The architecture of the akshara explains this pattern of development and the importance of phoneme processing to become more skilled with akshara reading. What this paper adds This paper adds to the existing evidence on reading acquisition in an akshara writing system, Malayalam, with the power of an explanatory model. A model of syllable and phoneme processing and akshara knowledge explains 87.8% of the variance in reading accuracy scores of Malayalam readers in early grades.The mastery of reading acquisition in Malayalam continues to develop beyond Grade 3. Phoneme manipulations are difficult compared to syllable manipulations, and mastery of these extends well beyond Grade 3. Phoneme processing remains low among unskilled readers and syllable processing accounts for the variance in reading performance. Implications for theory, policy or practice The study adds to the body of evidence concerning the theoretical underpinnings of learning to read, against the backdrop of Malayalam alphasyllabary.The interrelationships between phonological processing and reading accuracy imply that intervention strategies to improve reading should address both domains.Policy‐related implication is that the strategies to teach reading to young readers should consider a phoneme level instruction strategy alongside akshara teaching across different akshara types considering the complexity and nature of the Malayalam orthography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey of such errors that are observed in longitudinally collected, spontaneous speech production data of monolingual Malayalam and bilingual Malayalam–English acquiring children in order to identify both the range of commission errors and the underlying grammatical features that may have triggered them. A close analysis of the data shows us that such errors are restricted to a few grammatical loci and shed light on the specific challenges that some grammatical constraints pose for developing grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9–2;10 and 2;3–3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring Malayalam-English between the ages 1;9–2;8, 2;0–3;0 and 1;10–2;11 to recover the underlying grammatical constraints that govern the correct productions as well as errors across monolingual and bilingual contexts. We find rules that reference lexico-semantic properties to be particularly challenging to young children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Friedrich Schlegel hails from a prestigious German academic family and was an Indologist like his famous brother August Wilhelm Schlegel who founded the concept of Romanticism in Germany. Sanskrit played a major role in German society in shaping aesthetics and literary styles and helped the new field of study of comparative philology. The Danish government had sent German missionaries to Malabar region and these missionaries took back a lot of knowledge about Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but these early works lost their prominence in German academia. Instead, Sanskrit took over as a leading and influential phenomenon. This paper tries to study Friedrich Schlegel's important treatise "On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians" and understand if there are any reasons for the shift from Malabar languages to Sanskrit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic text summarization is a procedure that packs enormous content into a more limited book that incorporates significant data. Malayalam is one of the toughest languages utilized in certain areas of India, most normally in Kerala and in Lakshadweep. Natural language processing in the Malayalam language is relatively low due to the complexity of the language as well as the scarcity of available resources. In this paper, a way is proposed to deal with the text summarization process in Malayalam documents by training a model based on the Support Vector Machine classification algorithm. Different features of the text are taken into account for training the machine so that the system can output the most important data from the input text. The classifier can classify the most important, important, average, and least significant sentences into separate classes and based on this, the machine will be able to create a summary of the input document. The user can select a compression ratio so that the system will output that much fraction of the summary. The model performance is measured by using different genres of Malayalam documents as well as documents from the same domain. The model is evaluated by considering content evaluation measures precision, recall, F score, and relative utility. Obtained precision and recall value shows that the model is trustable and found to be more relevant compared to the other summarizers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the meaning of the two exclusive particles in Malayalam -e and ma:tRam. Though they are treated as exclusives with the English Focus particle 'only', the paper claims their semantic is not identical. The paper focuses on a significant aspect of the meaning of exclusives: the source and content of the prejacent and the universal (the exhaustive) meaning component. It is demonstrated here with conventional semantic tests for assertion, presupposition and implicature that both the former and latter meaning components are asserted in sentences with ma:tRam. However, -e differs in that the prejacent is presupposed while the universal is asserted. Identifying whether an inference is part of the sentence's assertion/presupposition/ implication is substantial, as this impacts these particle's distribution and discourse functions. This study would contribute to a unified theory of exclusives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports on the changing phase of sociolinguistics in India. The early phase of sociolinguistically oriented research is located within the philological tradition of India which ruled the early phase of the modern linguistics activities. The next phase was led by Gumperz and Pandit, who were deeply influenced by Emeneau, particularly with reference to outcomes of stable bi/multilingualism. Post Pandit, sociolinguistics in India took a major applied turn which lasted for nearly three decades. Beginning 2000 saw a variationist wave in sociolinguistics in India which has got stronger over the years. The paper analyses the factors that were responsible for the various turns that Sociolinguistics took over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about pause duration in typical speaking Malayalam Children with speed of lexical access in both healthy and disordered adults and children. Topics include assumption that silent pauses reflected time needed to plan upcoming language with pausing that were affected by preceding linguistic structure; and differences in child and adult pausing reflect differences in child and adult language but not in the cognitive resourcesallocated to language production.

The Indo-Portuguese creole languages that formed along the former Malabar Coast of southwestern India, currently seriously endangered, are arguably the oldest of all Asian-Portuguese creoles. Recent documentation efforts in Cannanore and the Cochin area have revealed a language that is strikingly similar to its substrate/adstrate Malayalam in several fundamental domains of grammar, often contradicting previous records from the late 19th-century and the input of its main lexifier, Portuguese. In this article, this is shown by comparing Malabar Indo-Portuguese with both Malayalam and Portuguese with respect to features in the domains of word order (head-final syntax and harmonic syntactic patterns) and case-marking (the distribution of the oblique case). Based on older records and certain synchronic linguistic features of the Malabar Creoles, this article proposes that the observed isomorphism between modern Malabar Indo-Portuguese and Malayalam has to be explained as the product of either a gradual process of convergence, or the resolution of historical competition between Dravidian-like and Portuguese-like features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are different textual content summarization processes available in natural Language Processing. Amongst them abstractive textual content summarization is one of the challenging problems in natural language processing and that too, with very little research done in regional languages. Unlike other summarization techniques, which reuses the words and phrases from the source text, abstractive text summarization builds a short and concise precis of a huge text document built from the underlying message of the text not necessarily using the same words and phrases from the source. The objective of the proposed work is to create a brief and understandable abstractive summary of a Malayalam document. Malayalam is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India spoken by over 34 million people and is designated as a Classical Language in India. Being a Classical language, Malayalam has a very unique syntactic and semantic rules which makes this work more important. The proposed work attempts to create an attention mechanism to generate the summary of the source document. In this work, the goal was to compare the efficiency of Attention model with sequence to sequence baseline model of Malayalam text and thereby implementing a better abstractive text summarizer for a malayalam document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims at understanding and comparing the development of participle construction and predicates in Malayalam speaking typically developing children of different age groups). A group of 10 normal children from each age group 5 yrs, 6 yrs 7yrs and 8 yrs were selected randomly. 20 pictures indicating each sentence containing predicates and participle construction were taken as stimulus to elicit response. Same stimulus is given for all age groups. For both predicate and participle construction: pictures indicating each sentence were shown in the laptop. The subjects were asked to respond for what is shown in the picture which should contain predicates and participle. For each correct response, a tick mark is given, and it is counted and checks how many correct responses were obtained without any cues. From the results it is evident that development of predicates and participle construction acquires or emerges as the age increases. The result of the present study indicates better performance was shown by 8 year old group compared to other age groups. The results also indicate that the predicates are acquired and developed earlier than participle constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: The study investigated the role of coarticulatory cues in the perception of consonants in Malayalam and its temporal window. It also compared normal hearing individuals and individuals with sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) for their ability to utilize coarticulatory cues for the perception of consonants. Methods: The study used quasi-experimental post-test only mixed research design. Fifteen normal-hearing individuals and 15 individuals with SNHL who were native speakers of Malayalam participated in the study. The stimuli included consonant-vowel syllables in their original and truncated forms. The forward-gating method was used to generate the truncated tokens. The participants were assessed for their consonant recognition in closed-set conditions. Results: There was a significant difference in the temporal window of the utility of coarticulatory cues across consonants and also between the two groups of participants. Conclusions: In normal-hearing individuals, coarticulatory cues are useful for the recognition of stop consonants, nasals as well as fricatives, with the maximum temporal window of utility seen in nasals. However, individuals with SNHL fail to utilize the available coarticulatory cues to recognize the consonants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of limited knowledge on verbal fluency performance in typically developing children, the present study aims at investigating the semantic fluency performance of Malayalam speaking children across age, gender and tasks. Using a cross-sectional study design, semantic fluency performance (on food and vehicle fluency tasks) was investigated in 1015 Malayalam speaking typically developing children aged 5 to 15 years. The findings revealed the positive influence of age and task with no substantial difference between gender groups, with good inter-rater and intra-rater reliability. The study outcomes depicted a distinct pattern of continuous and linear developmental trend in organizational strategies, with no specific age band showing any dramatic increase in performance. Semantic fluency as a task has great potential within the developmental context for understanding the highly language, culture, and task based word retrieval mechanism.

The widespread marginalisation of heritage languages in public and political discourse coupled with the association of proficiency in host languages with personal and professional gain have led many diasporic communities to shy away from transmitting their heritage languages at home (Curdt-Christiansen 2016): a context considered to be optimal for minority language maintenance (Vaccarino 2011). This does not imply however that attempts-on the part of migrants-to keep alive their heritage languages, are non-existent. Demonstrating a harmonious convergence between their everyday language practices and the above-mentioned assumption that the home is a 'stronghold' for heritage language use (Pauwels 2016 p.90) are a Malayali community based in Yorkshire, England. Making this a possibility was their commitment towards maintaining certain cultural practices and values associated with the first-generation migrants' country of origin, India. Drawing on semi-structured interview responses, observational field notes and audio-recorded family conversations obtained from this community, what I thus propose in this paper is that these cultural values and practices form the pillars that support the Malayalis' attempts to preserve their heritage language Malayalam. Furthermore, my findings suggest the agents behind these endeavours to pan across three generations, in two countries: the UK and India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores in depth various sandhi (joining) rules in Kerala's Malayalam language, which play a vital role in framing of the inflected and agglutinated forms of words and their compounds. It discusses significant progress in a scientific method to generate a specific annotated data set of Malayalam words that would be useful in many Natural Language Processing tasks which involve Malayalam preprocessing. The article discusses the results and issues encountered in developing this word-splitting tool for Malayalam, mainly in the context of improving the alignments between parallel texts that form a core resource in the Machine Translation task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on Semantic Intentions in 8-13 Year Old Malayalam Speaking Children. Topics include Semantic development is the acquisition of words and their meanings and the development of knowledge into a complex hierarchical semantic network of associated meanings; the present study aimed to hypothesize the usage of semantic intentions in 8-13 year old Malayalam speaking children; and speech-samples were audio taped from ten 8-13 year old Malayalam speaking children.

This paper's aim is to recognize offline Hand written Malayalam character in different images using optical character recognition, OCR is a challenging technology and popular of pattern recognition. Using OCR in Malayalam language is more complex because the language contains with largest number of characters among all other Indian languages. In this paper we propose an enhanced approach of offline handwritten characters. The steps in the proposed works are Pre-processing, Segmentation. In pre-processing the method used Otsu, Sauvola and Hybrid method, which is applying dilation on sauvola method. In segmentation we use word level segmentation and character level segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the principal features of the broadcasting language in Malayalam News from a cognitive linguistic view. This study integrates cognitive linguistic analysis with media study and argues that the language of broadcasting is a specific genre. Broadcasting news discourse is understood as a strategic deployment of cognitive factors such as metaphors and metonymies to foreground the socio- political reality within limited time. A qualitative analysis of sample from a corpus of different news bulletins from All India Radio stations in Kerala is conducted to illustrate such cognitive linguistic study. In the course of the analysis it is demonstrated how linguistic factors works in cognition of broadcasting language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the phonological and morphological features of Eranad Dialect have been well documented (Panikkar, G, K 1978, Sreenathan, M. et al 2015), the semantic value of the words, phrases, and particles peculiar to this dialect has been little explored. This paper is based on the semantic analysis of the suffixed verbs and post positions for expressing politeness in Eranad Dialect of Malayalam. The data for the study was collected as part of the Dialect Survey conducted by Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University. The study evaluates the peculiarities of the suffixed verbs and postposition (eg/kodōri/(bring IMPhonorific and polite) v/s/koda/(bring IMP - impolite)) used as a politeness strategy and compares them with the equivalent linguistic forms in Standard Malayalam. The contextual analysis of such linguistic forms was done to elicit its semantic value. The study also explored whether such suffixed verbs or postpositions alien to Standard Malayalam and other dialect of Malayalam was formed independently or as a result of phonological modifications in the existing root words (Eg./poikkōii/

This study is an attempt to present a picture of the evolution of Malayalam causative suffixes from the period of Inscriptional Malayalam (9th century) to Modern Malayalam. Since there are no definitely datable texts in the early Malayalam period, the study is confined to inscriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text summarization is an active research area in the field of natural language processing. Huge amount of information in the internet necessitates the development of automatic summarization systems. There are two types of summarization techniques: Extractive and Abstractive. Extractive summarization selects important sentences from the text and produces summary as it is present in the original document. Abstractive summarization systems will provide a summary of the input text as is generated by human beings. Abstractive summary requires semantic analysis of text. Limited works have been carried out in the area of abstractive summarization in Indian languages especially in Malayalam. Only extractive summarization methods are proposed in Malayalam. In this paper, an abstractive summarization system for Malayalam documents using clause identification method is proposed. As part of this research work, a POS tagger and a morphological analyzer for Malayalam words in cricket domain are also developed. The clauses from input sentences are identified using a modified clause identification algorithm. The clauses are then semantically analyzed using an algorithm to identify semantic triples - subject, object and predicate. The score of each clause is then calculated by using feature extraction and the important clauses which are to be included in the summary are selected based on this score. Finally an algorithm is used to generate the sentences from the semantic triples of the selected clauses which is the abstractive summary of input documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugandhi Enna Andal Devanayaki (2014) is a postmodern novel written in Malayalam language by T. D. Ramakrishnan set in Sri Lanka. The novel was translated to English byPriya K. Nair in 2018. The novel, inspired by the poem Andal by K Satchidanandan traces the lives of three women who are crushed by all-encompassing structures of power. The novel perfectly blends historicalfacts with myths and fiction to produce a meta-narrative which focuses on the lives of three women; Rajini, Sugandhi and Devanayaki. The novel traces the attempts made by Peter Jeevanandam to trace his lover Sugandhi, a jailed LTTE activist. Peter Jeevanandam is a member of a Hollywood production crew who are attempting to make a film on the life of Rajini Thiranagama, a human rights activist shot dead by the LTTE. The novel offers a feminist perspective on the workings of power structures tracing how the power structures at all times have tried to con trol and subjugate the mind and body of women. Rajini Thiranagama (1954-1989) was a supporter of LTTE who became disillusioned with the ideology of violence perpetuated by LTTE. She was shot dead in the year 1989, allegedly by LTTE for severing her links with the organisation. The novelist compares her fate with that of Devanayaki, a mythological heroine whose freedom was snubbed by the patriarchalforces. The story of Sugandhi is used by the novelist to throw light on the human rights abuses faced by the LTTE activists in the prisons of Sri Lanka. The paper mainlyfocuses on the objectification in feminist theoiy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on acquisition of morphophonemic structures in Children with Intellectual Disability and Malayalam speaking Children. Topics include considered that children with Intellectual Disability (ID) have deficits in syntax along with components of language in varying degrees throughout their lives; and determines Literature review in different Indian languages shows that several syntax structures assessed in typical children and children with Intellectual Disability.

The article reports on reference of Kannur and Calicut Muslims in Kerala. Topics include concludes that Malayalam is the languages spoken in South India and considered it as an official language of Kerala; research involves different types of address and reference terminologies that are used in a community; and demonstrates that the caste-based addresses are not used in normal conversations but in situation like abuses or fight.

Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system. Semantics is the study of meaning expressed by elements of a language, characterizable as a symbolic system. Semantic intention is defined as the meanings intended by children by using words or gestures. Semantic relation is nothing but meanings, intended by the child's verbal expression during two or third word combination stage. Understanding semantic intention and relation development in children is important for screening, diagnosis and intervention of language disordered children. Description of semantic intention and relation has been attempted in Indian languages such as Kannada (Bailoor and Rao, 2013; Kumaraswamy and Rao in intellectual disabled children, 2016), in Tamil (Krupa, 2009), in Konkani (D'souza and Kumaraswamy, 2014) and also in Malayalam (Athira, 2016 in intellectually disabled children; Mahesh in 2011(8 to 13 years)). The scientific studies related to normal development of semantic intention and relation of children within age group of 3 to 7 years in the context of general conversation and picture description has not been carried out. The present study is to understand the usage of semantic intention and relation in 3 to 7 years old Malayalam speaking children and to find the usage of semantic intention and relation in context of general conversation and picture discrimination. The study group consisted of 30 Malayalam speaking children with no history of speech language disorder and hearing disorder was selected. The speech sample was obtained from conversation and picture description tasks. Results indicate that children until age 7, continue to use semantic intentions and relations, although the syntactic knowledge has emerged and is inadequately used in different situations such as(general conversation and picture description). In Picture description task most of the semantic intentions and relations are present. When the scores were compared between conversation and picture description semantic intention and relation was not significantly different across the age group. Thus, the present study concludes that all parameters of semantic intention and semantic relation are already acquired in 3 to 7 years old Malayalam speaking children though slight subject variation exist which is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malayalam is an agglutinative morphologically rich language in which identifying the morphological suffixes of Malayalam verbs and nouns are tougher task. Morphology is the aspect of language concerned with the rule governing change in word meaning. Morpho syntactical aspects include PNG markers, participle construction, case markers etc. Participle is a form of a verb that is used in a sentence to modify a noun, noun phrase, verb or verb phrase, participle is often identified with a particular tense. Intellectual disability is a disability characterized by significant limitations in both intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior, which covers many everyday social and practical skills. The disability originates before the age of 18. Children with intellectual disability may also present with less mature syntax in association with the use of jargon, perseveration and difficulties with presuppositions. Acquisition of participle construction will give an insight of language by the child. Studies focusing on participle construction in typically developing children have been undertaken in languages like Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam. But studies focusing on children with intellectual disability are limited. The present study emphasizes comparing the participle construction performance of intellectually disabled children with typically developing Malayalam speaking children enabling the speech language pathologist for a focused assessment, better intervention and monitoring of therapy progress. The result showed that there is general increase in the usage of participle construction with increase in the mental age of the children. Expression of participle construction was better in typically developing children than children with Intellectual disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]