Investigations in Nepali Grammar

Four projects are currently active under the aegis of the Nepali Grammar Project. A summary of each project is given below.

CORGRAM: Corpus-based grammar in contrast

In this project, funded by the Arts and Humanties Research Council, we will use collocational techniques to look at the patterns found around grammatical elements adjacent to nouns and verbs in Nepali, in contrast to two other Indo-European languages: English and Russian. This work builds on our initial findings concerning Nepali postpositions.

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Nepali part-of-speech tagging

This undertaking is part of the Nelralec project. Linguists at Lancaster and at Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, have co-operated on the development of a part-of-speech tagset and a manually-tagged database of text. An automated part-of-speech tagger is currently being developed.

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The Bandhu Collection

In December 2005, Lancaster was awarded a grant by the British Academy to develop a digital resource for the investigation of spoken Nepali. The corpus, now under development, is a digitised and re-encoded version of the collection of spoken Nepali discourse made in the 1970s by Professor C. M. Bandhu, Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University.

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Collocational investigation of Nepali postpositions

In this investigation, we used a method based on statistical collocation to address certain problematic issues in the classification of the Nepali postpositions. This was based on theoretical viewpoints that stress the continuity of lexicon and grammar, and the emergence of morphosyntactic categories from the distribution of word-forms in text.

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Last updated 17th May 2006.