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"Thompson, Hanne-Ruth"
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Bengali
Bangla (Bengali), an Eastern Indo-Aryan Language, is the national language of Bangladesh with 150 million speakers and the state language of Paschim Banga (West Bengal) in India with 90 million speakers. There are sizeable communities of Bengalis scattered all over the world. Altogether, the number of native speakers make Bangla the fifth or sixth largest language in the world. Like Hindi and other South Asian languages, Bangla has subject-object-verb word order, postpositions, causative and compound verbs. Unlike Hindi it has no gender. This volume presents a systematic overview of the language, from the sound system to parts of speech, syntactic categories to reduplicative features and some short text passages. The book is written in transliteration throughout to provide ease and convenience to non-Bengali as well as to Bengali linguists and students. In order to connect linguistic analysis with the living language, the book is furnished with plenty of real language examples, demonstrating the spirit, grace and wit of the Bangla language.
eBook
Negation patterns in Bengali
Bengali has some unusual negation patterns which have not yet been examined from a syntactic point of view. There are two negative verbs nei and noy, and a tensed negative ni, a past tense version of na. This article challenges some traditional misconceptions of these structures, it looks at the syntactic environments of each of these negators in the context of actual language use, examines the areas of overlap between them, and arrives at a new understanding of these patterns.
Journal Article
Toward a definitve grammar of Bengali: A practical study and critique of research on selected grammatical structures
This thesis is a contribution to a deeper understanding of selected Bengali grammatical structures as far as their syntactic and semantic properties are concerned. It questions traditional interpretations and takes a practical approach in the detailed investigation of actual language use. My methodology is based on the belief that clarity and inquisitiveness should take precedence over alliance to particular grammar theories and that there is still much to discover about the way the Bengali language works. Chapter 1 This chapter on non-finite verb forms discusses the occurrences and functions of Bengali non-finite verb forms and concentrates particularly on the overlap of infinitives and verbal nouns, the distinguishing features between infinitives and present participles, the semantic properties of verbal adjectives and the syntactic restrictions of perfective participles. Chapter 2 In the attempt to define Bengali compound verbs I question the appropriateness of purely semantic criteria, which have prevailed in previous analyses. If syntactic criteria are taken into account we arrive at a more diverse and more accurate picture of the relationship between the two combined verb forms. Chapter 3 The majority of Bengali so-called postpositions are locative noun forms (spatial postpositions) or non-finite verb forms, which can function as postpositions. I have tried to develop some syntactic and semantic criteria in order to define the 'wordclass' of postpositions. Chapter 4 Bengali tenses are remarkably flexible in their uses. In order to gain a clearer picture of their parameters I have examined the co-occurrence of tenses and of tense restrictions in sentences with particular time adverbials. Chapter 5 Verbs of being and having are analysed according to their syntactic uses, restrictions, semantic features and overlap with one another, taking into account negative and non-present tense sentences. The chapter also establishes the importance of the zero verb as the main copula in Bengali. Chapter 6 This chapter looks at word order and selected sentence structures. The discussion focusses on the features and parameters of Bengali passive and impersonal structures. Findings from previous chapters have been taken into account. All chapters suggest areas of further research.
Dissertation