Reference to kinds: The perspective from Bangla
Ankana Saha
August 2023 

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.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007686 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 41
keywords:	kind reference, bare nouns, singular kinds, classifiers, bangla, semantics
Downloaded:	291 times

 

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