LISSIM 6

June 1-15, 2012@ Kangra

Selected Essays

(Non)veridical Bare Indefinites in Bangla
Anumitra Ghosh-Dostidar, DU

 In a (non)veridical or even in a monotinicity paradigm Bare indefinites in Bangla will be defined as weak NPIs, which means they are non-veridical or downward entailing expressions. However when these indefinites are suffixed with i they become strong NPIs which can only be licensed in anti-veridical or anti-additive contexts. As Zwarts (1995) has already demonstrated that downward entailment is a part of non-veridicality, there are no complications there. But in both the theories the basic assumptions are that anti-veridical is a subset of non-veridical and anti-additive is a subset of downward entailment. So weak NPIs can occur in anti-veridical context but not vice versa.

1.      jodi keu        baRite             aSe amae Deke dio.

 if somebody house/LOC come/PR/3 I/ACC call give/PR/3

 (If someone comes to my place, call me.)

2.      * jodi keu-i         baRite             aSe amae Deke dio.

 if anybody EMP house/LOC come/PR/3 I/ACC call give/PR/3

3.        kauke             dekhte    icche korche na.

  anybody         see/PTCP wish do/PR/PRG/3 NEG

  ((I) don’t feel like seeing anybody l.)

4.       kauke-i              dekhte    icche korche na.

  anybody/EMP  see/PTCP wish do/PR/PRG/3 NEG

  ((I) don’t feel like seeing anybody atall.)

One can produce similar examples taking various classes of non-veridical (as well as veridical) contexts and different indefinites and explore permutations and combinations but examples 1 to 4 should suffice to make the point for now.

In this context we can find at least (if not more) one set of data which does not follow the pattern stated before. If a set is defined in the sentence the bare plural cannot quantify the whole set and if at all it does it is stressed. This problem gets aggravated with respect to the different ontological categories of  Bangla indefinites, as some of them show this pattern more overtly than others.

 5.      aj       bajare            pabda, ilish, boal kichu-i            pelam        na.
        today market/LOC pabda,hilsa, boal anything/EMP get/pres/3 NEG.
        (Today in the market (I) did not get Pabda, Ilish or Boal at all.)

 

6.      # aj       bajare            pabda, ilish, boal kichu            pelam        na.

today market/LOC pabda,hilsa, boal any/something get/pres/3 NEG.

(Today in the market (I) did not get Pabda, Ilish or Boal .)

 

7.      aj       bajare            pabda, ilish, boal [kichu]_stress            pelam        na.

today market/LOC pabda,hilsa, boal anything/EMP get/pres/3 NEG.

(Today in the market (I) did not get Pabda, Ilish or Boal, none of these.)

Unlike Hindi bhii which has been discussed as ‘even’ (Vasishth 1998 and Lahiri1998) Bangla i probably works as emphatic (especially with respect to indefinite expressions). When i gets suffixed with an indefinite it clearly brings a closure to a set as also in the case of stressed indefinites.

The above idea is in a very rudimentary form and all aspects of it need to be tested with properly analyzed data.

Generally, the indefinite pronoun is regarded as consisting of a stem designating an ontological category as described by Jackendoff (1983) and a formal element which is called the indefiniteness marker. In the case of Bangla, as indicated by the above list and its complications, the boundaries between the ontological stem and the formal marker are not so easily demarcated. For example, in indefinite pronouns like keu and kichu, the stem and the marker are conflated in a single morpheme and cannot be physically differentiated as in English (according to Haspelmath) somebody (some-body) or anything (any-thing). At the same time, one lexical item is loaded by the two very distinct meanings of any and some. It gets more complicated when it occurs with the emphatic marker as mentioned before. The internalization of this semantic split is one among a range of complex phenomena that makes the Bangla indefinite pronoun worth examining. I am aware that this summer school may not provide precise solutions for the abovementioned research problem. But as I have mentioned in my earlier application at least two of the academicians who will be involved in it work on the broader area I am interested in. Lahiri’s (1998) work directly focuses on the NPIs and the indefinite series in Hindi.  Although until now my thinking with regard to the ontology of Bangla indefinites has not progressed beyond a point, it is one of the aspects I wish to examine through my PhD project. Interaction with Friedrike Maltmann could produce invaluable insights in this area.    

   

 

 

Reference

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1997. The landscape of polarity items. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Groningen.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1998. Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)veridical Dependency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 1999. Affective dependencies. Linguistics and Philosophy 22, 367-421.

Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and Philosophy 24, 659-735.

Heim, Irene.  1982. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts. Downloaded from http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WNhNDdiZ/.  29.07.2009.

Jackendoff, Ray (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ladusaw, William A. 1979. Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin.

Lahiri, Utpal. 1998. Focus and negative polarity in Hindi. Natural Language Semantics 6, 57-123.

van der Wouden, Ton. 1994. Negative Contexts. Doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen.

 Vasishth, Shravan. 1998. Monotonicity Constraints on Negative Polarity in Hindi. OSU Working Papers in Linguistics 51, 201-220.

Vasishth, Shravan. 2002 Word Order, Negation, and Negative Polarity in Hindi. OSU Working papers in Linguistics 53, 108-131.

Zwarts, Frans. 1995. Nonveridical contexts. Linguistic Analysis 25, 3-4, 286-312.

 

                             
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