A Unified Analysis of the Hindi & Bangla discourse particle -to

Abstract

Discourse particles are commonly found in a variety of languages. These particles often mark topichood, focus, contrastivity and other discourse sensitive features. Indic languages have a discourse particle -to, which has been analyzed in the existing literature as a marker of topichood (Bayer et. al. 2014) or contrast (Montaut 2015). In this paper, we examine the properties of -to in Hindi and Bangla. Based on our observations about the necessary pragmatic conditions that license the use of -to we conclude that -to is neither a topic marker nor a contrast marker. It is rather a particle that plays a particular role in common ground management. By the use of -to in a sentence a speaker indicates that the sentence fails to resolve the Issue at hand, i.e., the Issue raised by its prejacent in the given discourse (following the Table Model of discourse structure, Farkas and Bruce 2010). This establishes -to as an independent discourse category, thereby also broadening the range of functions discourse particles are known to perform cross-linguistically.