Invited talks

Diti Bhadra

Surprise, Emotion, Cognition: Mirativity in Tibeto-Burman

Since DeLancey (1997)’s seminal study positing mirativity as a category marking ‘surprise’ in natural language (building on Slobin and Aksu 1982, Aksu-Koç and Slobin 1986), a flurry of work has revealed diverging views on fundamental questions about this phenomenon: (i) how to define this category (Aikhenvald 2012); (ii) what its link is to other grammatical notions such as evidentiality (Rett & Murray 2013, Peterson 2016), illocutionary updates (Anderbois 2016), temporal reference (DeLancey 2001, Bustamante, 2012); (iii) whether the primary component is surprise/unexpectedness (Aikhenvald 2012, DeLancey 2012, Rett & Sturman 2021, Zhuang 2023) or just realization without surprise (Mexas 2016); (iv) what is the overlap with cognition/psychology (Peterson 2017) . In this talk, I bring to bear on these questions original semantic fieldwork data focusing on discourse particles and verbal suffixes from 3 Tibeto-Burman languages – Karbi, Mising and Yimkhiung. I add another dimension to the discussion – emotionally polar language, or particles that convey specific emotional responses (shock, happiness, disbelief) that co-occur with miratives in some languages, while in others, they themselves convey mirative meanings. My research agenda in this talk is to attempt to untangle the complex web tying emotion, evidence, realization, surprise and counterexpectation together in these particles and suffixes across Karbi, Mising and Yimkhiung, through a compositional semantics lens. Overall, this topic will facilitate discussion about what it means to be surprised / to realize something / to express an emotionally polar (exclamatory) response both cognitively and linguistically. 

Troy Messick

The domain and structure of reciprocals: Insights from Telugu

Building off of Messick & Raghotham 2025 on Telugu reflexives, I give a description and analysis of Telugu reciprocals, comparing it to a few other languages. Topics discussed will include case agreement, the internal structure of complex reciprocals, binding domains for reciprocals vs. (complex) reflexives, and the domain of agreement within adpositional and (extended) noun phrases.

Sameer ud-Dowla Khan

Bangla Sign Language: its context, its structure, its community

While research into the grammatical and phonological structure of sign languages has blossomed into a major branch of linguistics since Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg's pioneering work on American Sign Language (ASL) in the 1960s, many specific sign languages and even whole regions remain largely unstudied, including the sign language used in Bangladesh. Bangla Sign Language (BaSL or BdSL) is the primary language used by Deaf individuals in Bangladesh, who are estimated to number over 3 million, but unlike the sign languages of India, Pakistan, and Nepal, scholarly research into Bangla SL has been limited to a handful of attempts to produce computer models for automated recognition of individual letters of the Bengali fingerspelled alphabet (Jim et al., 2023; Podder et al., 2022; Rubaiyeat et al., 2024, among others), and crucially, one comparative study of the sign language of Bangladesh vs. that of West Bengal (Johnson & Johnson, 2016), finding substantial mutual intelligibility between the two.

Today's talk takes a closer look at Bangla SL, placing it within the context of South Asian sign languages through lexicostatistic comparison, while also focusing on the morphosyntactic and phonological structure of the language, highlighting sentence-final particles, directional verbs, and minimal pairs of different sign dimensions.

We report data collected virtually from both Deaf Bangladeshis and instructors / interpreters of the language, embedded within an understanding of the cultural context within which this language sits besides spoken and written Bengali, English, and international sign languages. We also show examples of lexical and phonological variation within and across signers.

Through our project -- still very much in its early stages -- we argue that Bangla SL fits within a larger South Asian sign language family, but which crucially developed independently of the better-described sign languages of North India, South India, Pakistan, and Nepal, and has shown phonological shifts to ultimately distance itself from nearby West Bengal Sign Language.