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Semantic contrasts in the 4-copula system of Bangla

Bangla has four different verbs corresponding to the English is. While copula verbs are often assumed to make no meaning contribution, languages with multiple copulas challenge this. I examine the behavior of the copula verbs in Bangla to ask what kinds of semantic contrasts are encoded by their distribution, and what each copula might contribute to the meaning of the clause.

Audience design in bidialectal speech

Most people can speak multiple varieties of a language, and they often adjust their speech depending on the social or linguistic context. This study analyzes political commentator Fareed Zakaria’s English over 21 years, showing how he shifts between Indian English and American English when addressing different audiences. The findings highlight how conscious choices and automatic language processes shape the way speakers adapt their speech in context, and how this compares to bilingual speech.

Uncertainty in indicative conditional antecedents

What is the role of the antecedent clause in a conditional? Examining a set of conditional expressions that restrict the tense/aspect of the antecedent clause, this work argues that these arise from a single modal restriction: some conditional devices require the antecedent to be open in a historical modal base. This suggests that conditionals can invoke modality in the antecedent that is independent of the modal flavor of the consequent, that this is a linguistically-relevant dimension of contrast in conditionals, and therefore that some part of conditional `iffiness’ must be lexically specified. This is difficult to explain under analyses where the antecedent simply restricts the domain of evaluation of the consequent.

Presupposition and implicature in Indian English only

Indian English allows for a use of only that differs from its more well-known ‘exclusive’ use. This work attempts to explain certain non-entailed inferences of exclusivity that arise from the use of IE only in terms of interactions between it’s presuppositional meaning and Gricean implicatures.

MA thesis: ach copula in Bangla

This project attempts to formulate a semantic account for the distribution and inferences associated with the copula verb ach- in Bangla, and its links to the progressive and perfect aspect morphology.

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Phonetic word-finder

Tool to generate lists of Bengali words matching specified phonological descriptions

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