The role of -i-na in Bangla ki-exclamatives

This paper analyzes the role of -i-na in Bangla ki ‘what’-exclamative structures. The distribution and behaviour of the negative marker na in the -i-na particle suggests that it is expletive in nature and is attached to the emphatic particle -i. We argue that -i-na attaches at the phrasal, but not at the sentential level. We also claim that -i-na carries an uninterpreted exclamative clause type feature and serves the purpose of domain widening which, as per Zanuttini and Portner (2003), is a crucial component of exclamatives. In this paper, we put on an argument in favour of Bangla ki having two lives: an argument life and a modifier life which is exclamatory by itself. We propose a unified semantics of -i-na, which can be compatible with both the lives of ki. Throughout the paper, we embrace the Hamblin denotation while analyzing the wh, ki and base our analysis of exclamatives on Balusu’s (2019) rendition of widening

Egocentric questions: The view from Bangla and Hindi-Urdu

In Bangla and Hindi-Urdu, we find a kind of question that is grammatically restricted to being about a particular event. This kind of a question consists of a demonstrative pronoun followed by a plain question. We refer to such questions as egocentric questions and to the demonstrative pronoun they con- tain as the egocentric pronoun. The egocentric pronoun picks out an event and the question is about this event. Since the speaker and the hearer need to pick out the event the question is about, such questions cannot be used in a state of speaker ignorance. This differentiates them from plain questions where speaker ignorance is the default. We show that various properties of egocentric questions follow from the need to be able to assign a reference to the egocentric pronoun and from the nature of access the speaker has to the event that the egocentric pronoun picks out.&nbsp