Revisiting Conditional Typology for Bangla

The paper presents new data on two strategies of forming Conditionals in the Eastern Indo-Aryan language Bangla: Correlative Conditionals and Participial Conditionals. It further shows that there is a subtle division of labor between the two kinds of constructions. It is proposed that the distributional difference between these two provides evidence in favor of the theories of conditionals that classify Hypothetical Conditionals and Biscuit Conditionals as having the same underlying semantics. Furthermore, it is shown that the distinction extends to the then-word tahole in the language. This leads to a pragmatic account of the conditional participle -le in different types of participial conditionals. The paper ends with discussing how a pragmatic account leads to an unresolved question regarding the syntactic classification of the conditionals

Adnominal Distributive Numerals in Bangla

This paper provides an introduction to the adnominal distributive numerals in Bangla and their interpretations. Discussing the licensing conditions of the adnominal distributive numerals, the paper classifies them with distributive items that require overt or covert, syntactically c-commanding clause-mate pluralities as their antecedents. The paper also shows that the Bangla distributive numerals can distribute over contextually salient non-atomic covers of plurals

Study of the distributive numerals in Bangla

Thesis: Ph. D. in Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-180).In this thesis, studying the numeral indefinites in Bangla, I argue that distributive numerals are not distributivity operators themselves. The distributive numerals introduce a plurality of discourse referents, and they require that this plurality of discourse referents must enter into a formal relationship with the plurality of individuals introduced by another discourse referent. This formal requirement is known as dependency. Conventionally the phenomenon is called covariation. A distributivity operator is such that it allows this formal relationship to hold in its scope. I argue that examples involving ditransitives provide clear evidence for such an analysis. Apart from this, I discuss that the different forms of numerals have an additional restriction about encoding specificity effects. I show that the requirement of specificity and the requirement of covariation interact with each other in the scope of a distributivity operator. This interaction is encoded morphologically by differentiating between simple and complex forms of distributive numerals. The proposal is implemented by using Dynamic Plural Logic. Finally I show that the particular formalization can be extended to account for the difference between adnominal distributive numerals and adverbial (which I call 'pluractional') distributive numerals. To analyze the adnominal and adverbial distributive numerals I propose to differentiate between distributivity in the domain of individuals and distributivity in the domain of events.by Ishani Guha.Ph. D. in Linguistic

Inverse Scope in Scrambling Languages: comparison with English

The parent project is designed to explore how word order and determiner types influence the interpretation of sentences with two quantifiers in languages with scrambling. Two previous sub-experiments on Bangla, using picture-verification tasks, showed a significant interaction between word order and determiner type in the rendering of the scope readings. The current study is planned to compare the results obtained from Bangla using conditions with English sentences. This study differs from the Bangla sub-experiments in one major respect: namely the factor of word order. Since English does not have scrambling, we have kept the word order constant to the default SVO in experiment design. There is another minor difference from the previous Bangla experiments: determiner type. Instead of two universal determiners (sob 'all' and proti 'each' for Bangla), the present design involves manipulating three universal determiners of English: namely, 'each', 'every' and 'all of the'. We predict a strong effect of determiner type in rendering the IS readings, as the previous experimental work on English (Feiman and Snedeker 2016) have shown