Polyfunctional heri (হেৰি) in Assamese: a view from Discourse Grammar
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Abhijnan Pritam Sarma
,
Tohru Seraku
and
Sweta Sinha
Abstract
Whilst there is a wealth of morphosyntactic studies on Assamese (Indo–Aryan), little attention has been paid to its semantic and pragmatic aspects. In this paper, we describe the polyfunctional item heri in Assamese, drawing on examples from podcasts, supplemented by film and web series scripts. We show that heri functions as a vocative (politely addressing an unknown person), a placeholder (substituting for a target form), an interjective hesitator (filling pauses interjectively), a general extender (yielding a conjunctive or disjunctive list reading), and a discourse marker (initiating new conversation topics). Furthermore, we model the grammatical, functional, and prosodic properties of heri across these distinct uses and analyse them in the framework of Discourse Grammar. The placeholder and general extender uses fall within the Sentence Grammar domain, and the vocative, interjective hesitator, and discourse marker uses are situated in the Thetical Grammar domain. Also, the developments of the interjective hesitator and discourse marker uses are examined through the lens of cooptation, a pragmatic operation whereby a unit in Sentence Grammar is recruited as a unit in Thetical Grammar. This study represents the first functional–grammatical analysis of Assamese based on spontaneous data.
Acknowledgments
This work greatly benefitted from the feedback received at the conference Placeholders in East and West (10–11 October 2024, University of Tübingen), where the first and third authors delivered a talk related to this study. We also extend our gratitude to Rijushna Gogoi and Bibek Nayan Deka for their assistance with data transcription and annotation, as well as to our language consultants, Padma Kumari Gogoi and Debraj Gogoi.We are also grateful to Dr. Jagat Chandra Kalita for his insightful feedback on the glosses of our speech data examples.
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Research ethics: Not applicable.
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Informed consent: Not applicable.
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Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission. Abhijnan Pritam Sarma (first author/corresponding author); Conceptualisation; Data curation; Writing (original draft: Section 2.1, Section 3); Reviewing/editing. Tohru Seraku (second author); Conceptualisation; Writing (original draft: Section 1, Sections 2.2–2.3, Sections 4–6); Reviewing/editing. Sweta Sinha (third author); Conceptualisation; Reviewing.
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Use of Large Language Models, AI and Machine Learning Tools: None declared.
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Conflict of interest: The authors state no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: Not applicable.
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Data availability: Not applicable. Data is drawn from freely accessible web sources.
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