Proceedings of the Third Students' Conference of Linguistics in India (Sconli-3)

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The organising committee of the Third Students' Conference of Linguistics in India (SCONLI-3) bring out the proceedings of the conference with great pleasure and happiness. The Students' Conference of Linguistics in India (SCONLI) is a two day international conference organized annually by students. Initiated in the academic year of 2006-07, SCONLI strives to provide a platform to the research students to share their research with the international audience. The aim of the Conference is to promote research activities among students of Linguistics. This Conference is a step towards building a network of future generation of linguists for better, in depth and widespread work in the area of linguistics. This year (2010) it reached its fourth year and was hosted by the Department of Linguistics at Mumbai University.

This students' conference, organized fully by the students with the help of the host institution and the CIIL, Mysore, has been a great success since its start. The third conference of its series hosted at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi saw an unprecedented response from the students within India and outside. In total we had about 110 abstracts and full papers. As the SCONLI is supposed to be a two day conference followed by a day of workshops in chosen fields, we always had a limited time period. The abstract review committee, comprising of the experts in the field, along with the student members, selected 40 research works undertaken by students in various sub-areas of linguistics to be presented at the conference. With a selection ratio of just a little above to one third, the conference speaks for its quality and competitiveness itself.

We take this opportunity to thank those who were helpful in making SCONLI-3 a grand success, maintaining the momentum so that the conference goes on, attracts participation from more students, and encourages the research work undertaken by students. Dr. Ayesha Kidwai our faculty coordinator was instrumental in whatever we did. Starting from writing the proposal to both our sponsoring agencies, the CIIL, Mysore and the JNU administration, it was her wisdom and guidance in organizing such things that came to our great help. Both the sponsoring agencies were very liberal in allocating funds for this conference. It was a challenge to provide accommodation to hundreds of students that include paper presenters and participants coming from all over India and outside. Thanks to the NCERT and the USO for providing their guest houses nearby JNU campus, we were able to accommodate all the participants. Our next important hurdle was to host the contents of SCONLI in the website.

When the conference got over, our website as hosted at our university website got dumped and we felt as if our presence and all the efforts that were put in were at a loss. Then we thought of running a website of our own. A dedicated website for SCONLI! Thus came our own website with the generic domain name of www.sconli.org. Here we hosted all the conference stuff within three days. We would like to apologise for the long time taken for the proceedings of the conference to be published. CIIL, Mysore promised to publish the proceedings. Unfortunately that could not materialise because of some technical reasons. A lot of time has already been washed out pursuing the matter. Thanks to our generous sponsoring, we had managed to save some bucks from the conference budget allocated for the conference. Nothing could be better than spending this money on publishing the conference proceedings. As this was a students' conference and the students being amateurs, finding an alternative publisher was also a tough job. Besides, the quality of the papers the conference received required that they see the light of their publication. Here, we would also like to regret the fact that some of the authors who presented their paper here, withdrew their papers and published them elsewhere.

About ten months after the conference was over in February, 2009, we got in touch with the current publisher willing to publish our proceedings. Shown a way out, we announced this on our website and embarked upon editing and proofreading the papers. As it was students' paper and many of the participants were writing their first research papers, amateurishness in their papers was inevitable. The proofreading and editing went through several phases, with several students from the organizing committee editing the text and the formatting. Starting from preparing the camera-ready copy of the proceedings to bringing all the papers to a particular format was a huge task and all the members, especially Ritesh Kumar and Atanu Saha, who spent time over this task need to be acknowledged at this phase. Without the blessings of our teachers at the university and outside, the success we got in organizing this conference wouldn't have been possible. We would specially like to thank the Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya who also guided us on several things, starting from creating the logo for the third conference till organizing the conference. We would also thank the members who organized the previous conferences of this series, mainly Atreyee Sharma and Paroma Sanyal for their insightful comments and guidance. We thank Prof. B. B. Bhattacharya, the Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Prof. Shankar Basu, the Dean of the School of Languages, Literature and Culture Studies, JNU, who graced the inaugural session of the conference and encouraged the students. The keynote address Prof. Ramakant Agnihotri and the presidential address of Prof. Anvita Abbi, the chairperson of the department then, were enchanting speeches that encouraged the students to continue their research work and delve deeper into the research of language and linguistics with a multi-disciplinary approach. Prof. Abbi also kept us encouraging throughout the process of going about it and made things easier for us. Last but not the least, without the help of the volunteering students of Centre for Linguistics, JNU from M.A./M.Phil./Ph.D. the success wouldn't have come our way. The enthusiasm shown by the students speaks for itself. The exhibition showcasing a panoramic view of language and linguistics in India was a great success. The posters prepared by Ritesh Kumar, Atanu Saha, Bornini Lahiri and others fetched great praises of people from all the disciplines. The pictures of these posters can be seen on the conference website www.sconli.org/sconli3 and speaks for the quality work they put into their preparation.

**Contents and Sample Pages**