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A DESCRIPTIVE ANALYSIS OF URALI
Sam Mohan Lal
C H A P T E R - I
 
INTRODUCTION
1.1  Methodology and the Format
The present study aims at a descriptive analysis of the speech of Urali people, a hill tribe of Tamil Nadu. The approach is data-oriented and uses in general the Neo Bloomfieldian model.
This monograph comprises of six chapters.
Chapter 1 Introduction
This introductory chapter is divided into two sections. The first section gives an ethnographic account of the moderately researched ethnic community known as `Urali’ which includes the geographical position of the area of study, introduction to the tribe, history and migration, livelihood, material culture, social structure, political organization and the impact of modern civilization. Since this monograph focusses itself on providing a linguistic description of Urali speech, only such features that may have a direct influence on speech and its divisions are presented here. For an elaborate ethnographic description see Sam Mohan Lal 1991.
In the second section, a four-way phonological and morphological comprative sketch of the speech of Urali with Irula, Literary Tamil, Spoken Tamil and Kannada as well as the peculiar characteristic features of Urali are discussed.
Chapter 2 Urali Phonemics
This chapter presents the description of various vowel and consonant sounds of Urali speech. The chapter presents the phonemic contrasts which include the contrast of both vowels, consonants and their distributions with illustrations. The allophonic distribution of both vocoids and contoids is presented separately with illustrations indicating the occurrence of the sounds.
While explaining the clusters found in Urali, both initial and medial clusters are described separately. Under the medial clusters, identical and nonidentical two consonant clusters are presented separetly. The three consonant clusters identified in Urali are also listed separately.
Suprasegmental phonemes found in Urali are presented through a description of the types of juncture and terminals.
Finally, the syllabic structure of Urali is discussed under three major heads: Initial, Medial and Final syllables. In each case, illustrative examples are given with gloss to explain the openness and closeness of a particular syllable. The six types of syllabic structure identified in Urali are presented with illustrations and syllabic divisions.

                                       

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