Tanmoy Bhattacharya

Obligatory Overt Wh-Movement in a Wh-in-Situ Language

Bangla has commonly been assumed to be an SOV wh-in-situ language. Here it is suggested that both of these characterizations are incorrect and that Bangla actually has obligatory overt wh-movement from a basic SVO word order. This is disguised by a conspiracy of factors but revealed in restrictions on wh-scope and certain apparently optional word order possibilities with complement clauses. Adopting a different perspective on the SOV status of Bangla allows for a simple explanation of the patterns observed and raises the possibility that other wh-in-situ languages may also have (obligatory) overt wh-movement.

Numeral/Quantifier-Classifier as a complex head

This paper claims that the complex consisting of the quantifier or the numeral in combination with the classifier in the Eastern Indo-Aryan language Bangla (Bengali) may be considered as a semi-lexical head in the sense that the complex exhibits several properties which are divided between lexical and functional heads. The thrust of this claim is most clearly visible in the analysis of NP movement inside the DP in section 3 which involves the complex as a whole and not some smaller part of it. In the first section of the paper, the semi-lexical nature of the complex head Numeral/Quantifier-Classifier (Num/Q-Cla hereafter) is considered followed by a brief discussion of five Zwicky criteria of head determination in section 2.

Diversity at Workplace and in Education

There is a potential conflict between the value of diversity at workplace—a concept touted and encouraged since the mid-1990s in America among private business/corporates—and the findings of the rights-based disability movement, namely (i) a person with disability (PwD) does not need charity, and (ii) disability is not a spectacle. A PwD represents in some sense the “spectacle of diversity” to an extreme in the mainstream unconscious imagination: if a prospective employer encourages hiring an employee with disability solely for the reason of diversity, then there is a problem. However, there ought to be some value to a practical implementation of a policy; i.e., if an organization wishes to implement a policy that encourages diversity in the workplace/institution, it ought to be considered an affirmative action. This is equally true of any possible future attempt at designing an instrument to ‘implement’ a theoretical perspective, be it from within the humanities or the social sciences; that is, actually hiring/admitting people as per a policy requirement may eventually lead to designing of an “instrument” or a set of algorithms, or a programme, to follow in cases of any such implementations. Nonetheless, designing instruments can address some of the issues which are often projected as problems which differentiate the social sciences from the humanities, since it has been argued that “designing” or “instrumentation” per se leads to a mechanistic world where human values are neglected—a bone of contention between the humanities and social sciences. A return to humanistic studies seems to be the only sure way of arriving at the truth. This is true in education as well as in employment, where the mere reportage of managers’/teachers’ or employees’/students’ satisfaction over employing PwDs and ignoring the axis of domination to investigate such status of employment, i.e. whether the person was employed/admitted “only” because of his/her disability to add to the so-called spectacle for the institute or whether because the organization truly believed in doing a good thing like diversity, does not constitute an analysis. This chapter thus critically examines the construction of diversity at workplace and in education with a view to comprehending the underlying notions.