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Share Paper 3786

Reference to Kinds: The Perspective from Bangla
Ankana Saha
519-529 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

This paper illustrates that Bangla adds a new dimension to our understanding of kind-oriented languages and classifiers in these languages. Bare nouns in Bangla show some of the hallmark properties of a kind-oriented language, but I argue that the full range of their distribution does not lend itself to a regular kind based approach. For a kind oriented language like Mandarin, regular kind terms are instantiated by bare nouns, and for property oriented languages like English or Hindi, bare plurals denote regular (plural) kinds. I present evidence that Bangla bare nouns do not pattern with these languages. I propose that the distribution of Bangla bare nouns can be accounted for in a view that treats them as singular kind terms instead. On a closely connected note, I discuss 'ra,' an animacy restricted classifier in the language, and I illustrate how its properties can be accounted for on the singular-kind treatment of Bangla bare nouns. The extensive use of singular kind reference in the language is attributed to 'ra,' which functions as a dedicated lexicalized type-shifter from singular kinds to their property correlate.

Published in

Proceedings of the 41st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
edited by Nikolas Webster, Yağmur Kiper, Richard Wang, and Sichen Larry Lyu
Table of contents
Printed edition: $545.00