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Equational Clauses in Bengali
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
1. In many languages there are clause types characterized by the presence of a subject and complement without an element of predication such as a verb ‘to be’. Clauses of this kind, which may be termed equational, display a number of similarities across languages. Frequently there is a special negative copula; in tenses other than the present, a verb ‘to be’ is sometimes required; word order may differ from that of nonequational clauses.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1965 by Linguistic Society of America
Footnotes
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I wish to express my gratitude to Charles A. Ferguson, Visiting Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington, for his encouragement and advice throughout the preparation of this paper.
References
1 For other descriptions of equational clauses, see Carl Brockelmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen 2.35–115 (Hildesheim, 1961); Pierre Chantraine, Grammaire homérique 2.1–6 (Paris, 1953); Maurice P. Cunningham, ‘A theory of the Latin sentence’, Classical philology 60:1.24–8 (1965); Alfred Ernout and François Thomas, Syntaxe latine 2 146–8 (Paris, 1953).
2 Presented in 1964 to the 26th International Congress of Orientalists in New Delhi; the paper will appear in the proceedings of the Congress.
3 There are various kinds of dependent constructions. Both Ferguson's ‘Clause negation’ and this paper use the representative dependent construction containing jodi ‘if’.
4 Clause structure is represented here by formulas which use plus signs for concatenation, angle brackets for optional occurrence, and colons for slot:filler identification.
5 All quotations in this paper are taken from §2.2 and §2.3 of the multilith version of ‘Clause negation’ obtained from the author.
6 W. Sutton Page, An introduction to colloquial Bengali (Cambridge, 1934).
7 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, A Bengali phonetic reader (London, 1928).
8 Bengali basic course, units 1–5 (Washington, D. C., 1960). Edward C. Dimock Jr. and Somdev Bhattacharji, An introduction to spoken Bengali, draft copy (University of Chicago, 1959).
9 It should be pointed out that na is an acceptable substitute for nɔ- in all occurrences of the latter.
10 Note that Mr. Sarkar was unable to decide whether or not nɔ- was acceptable in the clauses of Group III. Since he firmly rejected it for Group II dependent clauses, however, I imagine that it also does not occur in Group III, as it does not for Mrs. Kar.
11 Personal communication.
12 hoccen is the honorific third person present progressive; hocce the third person ordinary. Bengali verbs are not inflected for number.
13 Ferguson has also suggested to me that hocce may be used between subjects and complements in mathematical formulas and philosophical propositions, e.g. ‘If A is B and B is C, then A is C’. This usage was not investigated.