Hany Babu
Associate Professor
Department of English
University of Delhi
India
Biography
My specialization is in linguistics, within which my interest lies in the area of syntax and semantics of natural languages. I work within theoretical framework of generative linguistics. My initial work was on the clause structure of Malayalam. I looked at the hierarchical structure of functional categories within the DP and tense, aspect, modality, and negation. Another related issue that I am interested in is (in)definiteness and genericity. Recently I have been looking the Functional sequence in terms of the universal hierarchy proposed by Cinque. Apart from syntax- semantics, my other areas of interest are philosophy of language, phonetics, English grammar, and varieties of English in India. Outside linguistics I keep an active interest in issues related to gender and identity, where my engagement has hardly gone beyond teaching some texts and interactions with more knowledgeable colleagues and friends.
Research Interest
Theoretical Linguistics; Syntax and Semantics; Language Ideology, Language Policy and Language Politics; Marginalized Languages, Linguistic Identity, and Social Justice
Publications
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Genericity, Quantification, and Modality: The many faces of –um and –unnu in Malayalam. CIEFL Occasional Papers in Linguistics 12: 2006.
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Linguistic theory and South Asian languages. (Jointly edited with Josef Bayer and Tanmoy Bhattacharya). John Benjamins, 2007.
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Argument structure and aspect: The case of two imperfectives in Malayalam. Jointly with P Madhavan in Eric Reuland, Tanmoy Bhattacharya and Giorgos Spathas eds. Argument structure, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007.
