In this episode of DAP, Megh, Vatsal and Indranil are joined by Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta to continue our discussions around linguistics.


Dr. Mahanta is a professor at IIT Guwahati. An expert in phonology, her research interests involve documentation and phonetic/ phonological analysis of tone, intonation and other phonological and computational learnability phenomena in (mostly, but not restricted to) South Asian languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Northeast India.


We talk about Dr. Mahanta’s academic journey, her research and how it evolved into phonology, what it takes to do field work for phonology and how she formulates her research hypothesis. We also discuss some basics of phonology like the importance of stress in languages, ambiguity, tonal languages, vowel harmony.


We also discuss careers in speech technology, field linguistics versus lab linguistics and the roles and responsibilities of language scientists in the North East.


Recommendations:

  • ​Sound Patterns of English, by Noam Chomsky

  • The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, edited by Harry van der Hulst and  Nancy A. Ritter.

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