The relator noun construction in Assamese

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of relator noun constructions in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern part of India by a majority of people living in the state of Assam. The construction consists of a relator noun that functions as a head, and a genitive case marked noun that functions as a dependent. Semantically, most of the relator nouns encode spatial relation, such as place, path. However, some other relator nouns signal other relations, such as the ‘for’, ‘about’ etc. The occurrence of relator nouns is not an unusual phenomenon in Indo-Aryan languages. It has been analyzed as adpositions in many Indo-Aryan languages. However, I argue that the syntax of Assamese does not allow this analysis. It forms a distinct syntactic category, the behaviour of which is not similar to adpositions. Further, Assamese shares some close affinity regarding the relator noun construction with the neighbouring Tibeto-Burman languages such as Boro and Dimasa, rather than with the Indo-Aryan languages. Thus, this paper further investigates whether the resemblance occurs as a result of language contact or by accident.