‘The destiny of man is inextricably linked to the destiny of language’ The Generative Linguists of the Old world (GLOW), inspired by the pioneering work of Chomsky and his Many outstanding followers across the globe, believe that to unravel the abstract properties of human languages is to move forward in their quest to understand the human mind and its generative capacity for language. It is therefore heartening to note that in 2005, GLOW met in India, where well over two thousand years ago Linguistics as a Science was founded and where Grammar (Vyakaran) was considered the most important of the six branches of knowledge (out of the four language related branches; Phonetics, Prosody and Etymology being the other three) which men who aspired for wisdom were expected to learn. Panini’s astounding work on Sanskrit grammar found mention in Noam Chomsky’s 1965 preface to ‘Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’ as an example of the generative enterprise. Prior to that the Discovery of Sanskrit had enhanced India’s contribution to the study of comparative grammar (which was the evolutionary scientific paradigm of linguistic inquiry at the turn of the last century), and in the post-generative grammar phase it was again contact with India as a ‘Sociolinguistic giant’ which strengthened the sociolinguistic enterprise to link competence with performance.

CIIL as the apex body on language matters of the country is committed to take forward all those who are engaged in the scholarly pursuit of understanding human language in general and Indian languages in particular. Even a cursory look at the papers in the volume will bring to the fore that several reputed researchers and teachers from across the world had come together in this endeavour at Delhi, where representatives from both Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University had lend the proceedings, even though somewhat delayed, will contribute in some manner to revitalization of linguistic studies in the country and foster more enduring partnerships in future that would make findings of the Old World relevant to the emerging New World as an After- glow.

The 5" GLOW Conference was held at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi from 5" to 8"" October, 2005. The conference was funded by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. A large number of academicians under the rubric of generative linguistics made their presentations on diverse fields like acquisition studies, historical linguistics, sign language studies, phonology, evolutionary linguistics, etc. and observations from diverse languages ranging from Tagalog to sign languages. Prof. K.A. Jayaseeelan inaugurated the conference with his keynote lecture. Prof. Mamuro Saito, Prof. Tim Stowell, Prof. Veneeta Dayal, Prof. Anoop Mahajan, Prof. Guiseppe Longobardi, Prof. Alice Davison among others were the invited speakers of the conference. The 5™ GLOW Conference was another milestone of GLOW in India.

Of the 54 presentations in the conference, 24 papers are included in the proceedings volume. These papers are on a wide range of syntactic-semantic and phonological phenomena drawn from a wide range of languages on architecture to articulation. In a way, the present volume adds to the growing knowledge in our understanding of natural language in its diachronic- synchronic, relatedness-variations, architecture-acquisition, and computation- articulation aspects.

We take this opportunity to thank Dr. Ayesha Kidwai and Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya who not only made the conference possible but also the proceedings volume. We are immensely grateful and indebted to them for being editors without portfolio.

**Contents and Sample Pages**