‘-Te/-e’marker as a plural in Bangla

Abstract

  The current work deals with the morphological marker -Te/-e in Bangla. It analyzes the form, function, and structural position of the marker and proposes that, among various other roles, this marker yields the interpretation of a plural marker in restricted contexts. This study further claims that along with -raa, -Te is another associative plural in the language found with conjoined DPs with added ‘collective’ or ‘together’ semantics. This claim becomes interesting in the backdrop of Bangla being a classifier language. This novel proposal deconstructs the dominant thesis regarding the absence of plural in a numeral classifier language. It also suggests that the definition of the plural is much more varied than what has been discussed in the literature.