This study examines the use of terminology related to syntactic variation in six linguistic journals (i.e., Corpora, the Journal of English Linguistics, the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Journal of Historical Linguistics, the Journal of Linguistics, and Syntax). Our analysis is based on a corpus consisting of articles published between 2012 and 2021. Subjecting these contributions to quantitative and qualitative analyses of the three target word pairs ‘canonical’ vs ‘non-canonical’, ‘marked’ vs ‘unmarked’, and ‘standard’ vs ‘non-standard’ revealed that the non-negated forms outmatch the negated forms in frequency. The collocation analysis showed that this can also be related to ‘marked’ being used as a past-tense verb form and ‘standard’ being used as a noun. Even though there are clear differences between journals, individual authors are also prone to favour specific terminology over other. Bigram analysis additionally revealed that the words of the three pairs are used with partially overlapping but also distinct meanings, at times reflecting ideological underpinnings. This might make it advisable for authors to explicitly reflect on their terminological choices when it comes to the description of syntactic phenomena related to (non-)canonicity.

This chapter shows that the current BJP government frames Muslim women’s rights as separate from Muslim men’s rights, and Muslim women as victims of Muslim men. When historical events vitalize stereotypes, as in the two events I will examine in this chapter, the Muslim woman emerges as a subject of rights as part of the Indian nation-state. The Shah Bano controversy in 1985 was a matter of maintenance or alimony for Muslim women after divorce. The resulting judgment denied rights to alimony to Muslim women under Section 125 of the Indian Constitution. This was the first moment where the Muslim woman subject was constructed as one to be saved. Indian National Congress and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi were the critical actors at that time. More than thirty years later, when India was firmly in the grip of Hindu nationalism, the victimhood of the Muslim woman subject became relevant again with the second Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights) Bill presented and passed in August 2019 which outlawed instant triple talaq in the Sharaya Bano case.

Discontinuous forms are non-canonical options where the choice of the form cannot immediately be related to discourse functions. Rather, the choice between a continuous and a discontinuous variant has been linked to cognitive complexity – speakers will use that form that is easier to process for the hearer. Usually, the non-canonical (i.e., discontinuous) variant is associated with a higher degree of cognitive complexity, which raises the question of why these variants exist in the first place, especially since discourse functions are not as obvious as with other non-canonical word orders. Putting to the test processing-based explanations in two experiments, this chapter investigates the choice between a continuous and a discontinuous particle verb. While the data from a rating task are aligned with previous findings from corpus studies, the data from a reading experiment are not, showing that the continuous variant does not always facilitate reading. This suggests that the non-canonical (i.e., the discontinuous) form might serve functions apart from information-structural ones.

The introduction underlines the need for this book and lays out the parameters that are important to understand the intricacies of Indian politics that forms the context of this book.