LSIEL 36: Word Formation in Bengali

Word Formation in Bengali

A Whole Word Morphological Description and its Theoretical Implications

Shishir Bhattacharja
University of Dhaka

This book has two agendas:(i) it presents a morphological description of Bengali, an Indo-European language spoken in South Asia and eventually (ii) examines whether the Whole Word Morphological theory (WWM) developed by Alan Ford & Rajendra Singh of the University of Montreal is an adequate model for such descriptions.

WWM claims that words do not have any internal hierarchical structure. Implicitly, units smaller than word (such as stem or affix) cannot exist and there is no need for multiple morphology like compounding, derivation, inflection or reduplication. A typical WWM view is that a good number of words of some lexicon are formally and/or categorically different and semantically related to each other. Whenever there exist at least two pairs of words based on the same formal difference, categorical affiliation and semantic relatedness, a particular (morphological) strategy becomes part of the morphological module of the speaker-hearer.This book, for instance, presents a morphological profile of Bengali constituted of the different aspects of its word-formation on the basis of a list of around 1200 strategies and in consequence shows that WWM is an adequate model for morphological description in general.

Shishir Bhattacharja, Ph.D. (Montreal) was trained in Linguistics and Indology at the University of Sorbonne, Paris. His main area of research is Syntax and Morphology. He has published several articles on Bengali grammar. His most recent book is Sanjanani Byakaraon (1998), a collection of articles, written in Bengali, on generative syntax. He has been working at the University of Dhaka as an Assistant Professor of French since 1995.

ISBN 9783895863561. LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 36. 480pp. 2007.