The Syllable Structure Of Bangla In Optimality Theory And Its Application To The Analysis Of Verbal Inflectional Paradigms In Distributed Morphology

The Syllable Structure of Bangla in Optimality Theory and Its Application to the Analysis of Verbal Inflectional Paradigms in Distributed Morphology

Syllable Structure of Bangla

Syllable Structure of Bangla: An Optimality-Theoretic Approach is a three part study designed to provide students/readers with a better understanding about the structure of Bangla syllables in terms of phonology and morphology. The book is divided into twelve chapters with each chapter focusing on one particular area of the study. The first part of this three part study focuses on the frequency of occurrences of different consonant clusters in Bangla. It argues that these clusters are best described with the help of the Bangla lexicon into three strata that include native Bangla words (NB) as well as Sanskrit borrowings (SB) and other borrowings (OB). This part of the study focuses on the analysis of these syllabic structures in Bangla with the help of the Optimality Theory (OT). The second part of the study focuses on a morphological analysis of the standard verbal inflectional paradigms of Bangla in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). This includes categories of tense/mood, levels of politeness and persons. This analysis is then compared with the English verbal inflectional morphology. In a later stage, Kar picks up the Optimality Theory from where he left it at the first part and applies it to analyze the outcomes of the morphological analysis in DM and following phonological changes on them.

Universal or Diverse Paths to English Phonology

The book is concerned with the acquisition of English phonology, both segmental and suprasegmental, by learners of English as a second language, as a third language and by speakers of a postcolonial (“new”) variety of English. It focuses on the acquisition process and factors influencing it, based on insights from all three disciplines.