Introduction

Pahari is an Indo-Aryan language and one of the ancient languages of South Asia. Historically, it was promoted by the Buddhist dynasty of the Harappa civilisation. Later, the language earned prestige in the reign of King Ashoka, who honoured Pahari as the official language of his state. Under his rule, the first university in South Asia was established at Sharda in the Neelam Valley near Muzaffarabad, Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Pahari flourished at Sharda University, written in the Sharda script, which was named after the place where the university was established (Karnai, 2007). Later in history, the language could not be promoted as it flourished in the past. Consequently, it lost its status and became an endangered language.

Now, Pahari is mainly used for oral communication. The language was not sufficiently explored linguistically until recently when local linguists of Kashmir took an interest in their regional languages. Despite that, the language has neither written grammar nor a compiled dictionary (Khan, 2013). Literature in Pahari is limited to a few pieces of poetry written in Urdu script. Therefore, it is not included in the school curriculum, unlike some other regional languages in Pakistan. Abbasi and Asif (2010) reported it as an underdeveloped, unprivileged, and ignored language that needs proper orthography. During the last decade, local linguists explored Pahari's phonology and syntax. However, the semantics of the Pahari language is a field that needs attention. This study explores the semantic range of Pahari words that are sensitive to stress. This feature is further compared to English, where stress strictly remains a pure phonological feature and does not create an association with semantics.

Pahari is rich in many dialects, such as Mirpuri, Gojri, and Hindko, spoken in various regions of Azad Kashmir. Among these, the dialect spoken in Rawalakot was called Poonchi by Abbasi and Asif (2010). This dialect is spoken in Rawalakot and is considered the central dialect of Western Pahari by most Pahari linguists, as reported by Khan (2013). The dialect is diverse enough to have many variants for a single referent and carries a variety of meanings with a slight phonological difference.

Semantics is the study of meanings; the term was derived from the ancient Greek word "smantikós, " meaning significant. Semantics focuses on the relationship between signifiers, like words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for—their denotation. Generally, words in any language have well-established literal meanings studied under semantics. Along with literal interpretations, meanings may depend upon context and are studied under pragmatics. Where pragmatic meaning exhibits an advanced language level, learning literal meaning is fundamental to learning any language.

Before modern linguistics, the meaning of a word was assumed to be unaccountable. However, semanticists have now been able to state that the sense of a word can be analysed in terms of a set of more general sense components, semantic properties, or features. The theory, componential analysis (CA) or feature analysis or contrast analysis, is a method of lexical semantics understructuralist approach that analyses the structure of a word's meaning. Componential analysis was patterned on the phonological methods of the Prague School, which described sounds by determining the absence and presence of features. This study will use the theory of componential analysis not as the framework but also as the method of data analysis.

The language was seen as a concrete act of singing, speaking, and writing by Crystal (2008). All these linguistic levels of language evaluation are primarily concerned with meaning in one way or another. Meaning is an extremely sensitive component which can be changed by changing a single phoneme or morpheme (Saeed, 2015). Therefore, meaning has become complicated due to its sensitivity and multilayered nature. There are various forms of meaning at deeper levels. However, it is roughly divided into three broad categories, i.e., linguistic meaning, social meaning, and affective meaning. Sense and reference are traced in linguistic meaning, context provides social meaning to the language units, and the affective meaning of linguistic units depends upon the user's utterance (Babalola, 2014).

Nwaozuzu (2013) holds that discoveries and analyses of different fields of language have gained attention in linguistics; however, certain other fields, such as semantics, need answers, explanations, and concrete definitions. On the other hand, Anabogu et al. (2010) declare semantics as the most advanced level of grammatical analysis related to the meanings of words and how these meanings are incorporated within phrases and clauses in any language. Semantics is concerned with exploring the linguistic meanings of words within a language. Along with many other prominent sub-fields of semantics, under the structuralist approach, lexical semantics explores the relationship between components of the meaning of a word. CA is considered one of the most influential frameworks for articulating key aspects of lexical semantics to explain linguistic meaning (Ifeagwazi, 2016; Murphy, 2011).

Anthropologists initially devised CA to compare vocabulary from different cultures, and semanticists have developed it as a general framework for analysing meaning (Crystal, 1984). It was then believed to reveal the culturally important features of language speakers distinguishing different words in the domain (García-Sánchez, 2015). CA is also reportedly inspired by structural phonology too; stating that CA defines the conceptual building blocks/ semantic components or features just as phonemes characterise contrastive dimensions (Geeraerts, 2017).

After determining the lexical field, in-depth meaning can be understood by exploring internal sense relationships between its components, particularly those sufficient to exhibit meaning more clearly (Al-Zoubi, 2009; Shalihah, 2015; Yu & Liang, 2016). Distinctive meanings are vital to learning a language because it develops the schemata of the field, which is how knowledge multiplies (Hameed, 2013). Using techniques such as arbitrary descriptive metalanguage and a reductionist approach to meaning performs CA. These techniques decompose lexical meaning by making comparisons by describing the presence and absence of features. The symbol [+] represents the presence, and the symbol [-] shows the absence of the feature. For example, ‘human’ is perceived as a general schema of some English words such as man, woman, boy and girl. To decompose this general schema, lexemes can be broken into their sense relations. Here, a man is [+ adult -female +human], a woman is [+adult -male +human], the boy is [-adult +male +human], and a girl is [-adult -male +human] (Murphy, 2010; Saeed, 2015; Widyyastuti,2010:).

CA is arguably advantageous in the study and formal representation of meaning. However, its limitations are also apparent; it can only be applied to the same semantic domain rather than the whole lexicon. In addition, anything that appears in the general definition of a lexeme cannot be converted into sense components. Moreover, it generates but does not conclude the debate about whether semantic features are the universal primes shared by all world languages (Gnatkovska, 2014). Riemer (2016) proposes that these limitations can be addressed by remodelling descriptive metalanguage and further developing it to account for the semantic complexity of context and utterances.

The research design for this project is qualitative as it enables researchers to in-depth study of the phenomena in their natural setting, without controlling variables, not directly related to the study. It further empowers researchers to explain situations without manipulation or intervention.

Convenience sampling was applied to select ten participants selected for the study. The participants were both male and female, un-educated Pahari speakers aged thirty to forty-five. The speech of educated speakers is urbanized and has been influenced by the national and foreign languages. Therefore, they were not selected for the sample.

Lexical items were randomly selected that provide stress variants in both languages. Praat was used to analyse stress in the Pahari words. The lexical items were spoken in a sentence, e.g., ‘anss is ki mundi akhneyan’ (we call it ‘mundi’). The rest of the words were excluded in the Praat analysis, and the spectrographs were generated showcasing the stress variants only. After tracing the stress location, the words were then analysed using the componential analysis technique.

The data consists of ten English and ten Pahari lexical items. More than ten words would make a lengthy analysis; therefore, this number was chosen for a compact and precise discussion of the phenomenon. English lexical items were selected from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (9^th edition). Pahari lexical items were selected through observation. For analysis, the data appears in the form of sets, in each set, English stress variants along with componential analysis will appear in the first place. English is a well-documented language, therefore only the spectrograph of stress in Pahari is presented here. In the second place, spectrographs of both Pahari stress variants are presented followed by their componential analysis. The compositional analysis is presented in tables listing [+] for the presence and [-] for the absence of features.

Addict (English)

Lexical stress in Pahari is a sensitive phenomenon that brings about semantic variation. It can change the syntactic category; at the same time, the semantic field is always changed with the stress shift. Conversely, English maintains the semantic field more often, but the syntactic category continuously varies. Thus, stress functions for different purposes in Pahari and English.

Some significant findings of this study that go as under;

? In English, nouns are usually changed into verbs or vice versa, but the data shows that in Pahari, nouns are changed into nouns, verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adjectives by the stress shift.

? By shifting stress, the vowel in the stressed syllable changes in English but remains unchanged in Pahari.

? Semantic features, or the semantic field, are usually the same in English due to stress shifts, but they always come with a sharp contrast in Pahari.

? Changes in the semantic field and the semantic category have mainly been observed in both Pahari and English disyllabic words.

? It is not easy to describe the meanings of all the words in componential analysis, but it has proved to be a fair approach in most cases.

? It is easy for native speakers of any language to understand the meaning of a word under specific stress placement without decomposing a word in its feature, but it is difficult for the non-native speaker or the observer.

? Speech, especially the pronunciation, of educated Pahari speakers is influenced by Urdu and English, as there is a great tendency to use Urdu and English for communication among educated communities in the Pahari-speaking areas.

? There is a noticeable difference in Pahari pronunciation between the speech of old, uneducated native speakers and young, educated native speakers.

Semantics and phonology of Pahari are vast fields for conducting research. Future researchers can analyze stress in multisyllabic Pahari words. As tone and stress connect closely in tonal languages, tone can be explored in Pahari. Many basic phenomena in semantics have yet to be addressed in Pahari, such as researchers can investigate the connotative meaning of Pahari lexical items and their denotative counterparts. Ground-breaking theories of semantics can be tested along with Pahari.