Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Bengali Vowel Sounds in Cardinal Diagram
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter I Word: A Conceptual Complexity
- Chapter II Usage of Some Word-formative Elements in Bengali
- Chapter III Frequency of Use of Words in Bengali
- Chapter IV Structural Components of Bengali Words
- Chapter V Use of Affixes with Bengali Words
- Chapter VI Postpositions Used in Bengali
- Chapter VII Compound Nouns and Adjectives
- Chapter VIII Structure of Reduplicated Forms in Bengali
- Chapter IX Lexical Naturalization in Bengali
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
- Appendix III
- Appendix IV
- Appendix V
- Appendix VI
- Appendix VII
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Bengali Vowel Sounds in Cardinal Diagram
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter I Word: A Conceptual Complexity
- Chapter II Usage of Some Word-formative Elements in Bengali
- Chapter III Frequency of Use of Words in Bengali
- Chapter IV Structural Components of Bengali Words
- Chapter V Use of Affixes with Bengali Words
- Chapter VI Postpositions Used in Bengali
- Chapter VII Compound Nouns and Adjectives
- Chapter VIII Structure of Reduplicated Forms in Bengali
- Chapter IX Lexical Naturalization in Bengali
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
- Appendix III
- Appendix IV
- Appendix V
- Appendix VI
- Appendix VII
- Bibliography
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The book is all about the descriptive study of surface form and usage of Bengali Words based on data and information obtained from a large corpus of modern Bengali written prose texts. The corpus contains more than five million words of written text samples collected from more than eighty five different subject domains published between 1981 and 2000. This book has exhaustively used all kinds of data, information and examples from this corpus only. This book is, therefore, the first exhaustive Work on modern Bengali words with close reference to actual data and information of real-life language use.
In this book, I have made an empirical attempt to analyse Bengali Words and other lexical items from the perspective of their surface orthographic forms to understand the internal structure of their composition with a clear focus on their functional roles in various contexts of their usage in texts. To achieve this goal, I have to bridge up an intelligible link between the internal composition and external representation of the words in the interface of usage and function of the Words in texts. Although several attempts have been made by earlier scholars to analyse Bengali words from etymological or morphological point of view, serious attempt has hardly been made to explore into the structure or surface forms of words. The primary motivation is to look into the texture of Bengali words as they are found to be used in texts and analyse the information embedded Within their structure from the lexico-semantic as well as functional perspective. The corpus data, used for this study, supply large amount of information about the form and usage of words – based on which I have been able to draw deductive inferences with regard to the patterns of use of words and Word-formative elements in the language. The issues that are adequately addressed in different chapters of this book include decomposition of words, interpretation of function of Word-formative elements and analysis of lexico-semantic identities of these components in relation to their function in words.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Descriptive Study of Bengali Words , pp. xv - xxPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015