LANGUAGE IN INDIA

ADVERBIALS IN BANGLA-
A Structural and Semantic Perspective

Anwesa Bagchi, M.A., and Tulika Basu, M.A.

FOCUS OF THIS STUDY

This study focuses on the structural and the semantic nuances of the Adverbial Group in Bangla. In describing the Bangla Adverbial Group, this paper concentrates on its structure and semantics of the Adverbial Phrase alongside Adverbial Clause for the purpose of identification and understanding of the function of such groups with the help of a set of chunking rules that has been thoroughly discussed in the course of this paper.

These rules have been carefully formulated after a detailed study of the Adverbial chunks in Bangla. In Bangla, identifying different ‘Karakas’ with the help of the Karaka marker i.e. the ‘Bibhakti’ has proved to be a rather non-deterministic method, especially in the field of Machine Translation since there are ample instances where a single Bibhakti can be used for representing multiple ‘Karakas’ or the Bibhakti getting dropped. These chunking rules can prove to be an effective solution to this problem.

This paper may be considered to be a maiden effort in analyzing the Adverbial groups in Bangla since not much work has been conducted to identify and study such Adverbial groups in Bangla.

MINIMAL SYNTACTIC CONSTITUENTS - KARAKA RELATIONSHIPS

In the Indian grammatical perspective, the minimal syntactic constituents are usually inflected units, which show signs of mutual relationship with each other and build up the sentence. This mutual relationship is usually termed as the Karaka relationship, which helps in identifying the semantic chunks consisting of functional units.

PROBLEMS OF BANGLA TO ENGLISH MACHINE TRANSLATION

For Bangla to English Machine Translation, identifying such semantic chunks with the help of Bibhakti often becomes a difficult task, which leads to lots of ambiguity as Bangla Bibhaktis are generally mapped onto the English temporal and locational Prepositions. But places where the Bibhakti gets dropped or a single Bibhakti is used for representing multiple Karakas, it is almost impossible to map them to any English Prepositions.

So, these linguistics rules can help in the generation of the appropriate forms in the target language as it was intended in the source language for conveying the exact meaning.

Thus, these adverbial-chunking rules can prove to be one of the alternative solutions for the correct identification and understanding of such adverbial local word groups [7] or semantic chunks in Bangla. Although the Adverbial Group consists of different subgroups, the discussion in this paper would primarily revolve around on the Adverbial Phrase and the Adverbial Clause in Bangla.

DEVELOPING A BANGLA CORPUS

For analyzing the Bangla Adverbial Phrase and the Adverbial Clause, a Bangla corpus of almost 3 lakh sentences were carefully studied and 2000 sentences were manually selected. These sentences were then functionally tagged and tree structures were constructed by expert linguists. Adverbial Phrases and Clauses were marked. This resulted in a set of rules. The rules were examined on a set of 5000 sentences with 80% accuracy.

WHAT IS A FUNCTIONAL ADVERB?

A Functional Adverb is the head of the Adverbial Phrase and Adverbial Clause in Bangla. A functional adverb is a syntactic element within an adverbial phrase or a clause which behaves and functions like an adverb although it may or may not be belong to the adverb part of speech class.

In an Adverbial Phrase, a functional adverb generally takes the form of an Adverbial Noun, Locational or Temporal Postposition of the phrase. These terms are later examined in details. While in case of an Adverbial Clause, the functional adverb mostly takes the shape of a non-finite verb excluding the gerund form (verbal noun).

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