Assistant Professor

Ms Kousani Banerjee

Department of Literature and Languages

Interests

  • Formal Semantics
  • Syntax
  • Pragmatics (and their interface)

Education

2016

Gokhale Memorial Girls’ College,
University of Calcutta, India
B.A. Major Communicative English

2018

Jadavpur University,
Kolkata, India
M.A. Linguistics

2024

The English and Foreign Languages University,
Hyderabad, India
PhD (Submitted)

Experience

  • June 2025 - Present - Assistant Professor - SRM University-AP

Research Interest

My PhD research investigates the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface of wh-exclamative constructions in Bangla, an understudied South Asian Indo-Aryan language. It focuses on matrix wh-exclamatives, multiple and reduplication of the wh-elements, and their interaction with negation, with the aim of developing a unified compositional analysis. This line of inquiry has naturally led to a broader investigation of wh-questions, including a novel interrogative form in Bangla marked by the demonstrative suffix -e, which yields egocentric questions—characterized by speaker-oriented surprise and varying between rhetorical and information-seeking interpretations. I have also briefly explored the distribution of indefinites in Bangla and Hindi-Urdu, focusing on their acceptability in polar disjoint interrogatives and their incompatibility with alternative questions. This work engages with the syntax and semantics of interrogative structures and the behavior of disjunction particles. Additionally, I have explored aspects of tense and aspect in Bangla, as well as conditional constructions, with particular attention to ‘even-if’ conditionals.

Awards & Fellowships

  • 2022 - International Travel Grant from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad to present my paper on “On the semantics of multiple wh-exclamatives in Bangla” at the 27th Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB 27), Charles University,Prague.

Publications

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS

  • Kousani Banerjee, The universal perfect (U-Perfect) formation and the ordering of temporal adverbials in Bangla. Jadavpur Journal of Languages and Linguistics; eds. Atanu Saha and Samir Karmakar; Volume 2, Number 1, (2019), pp. 104-114. ISSN: 2581-494X

PEER-REVIEWED PROCEEDINGS

  • Arka Banerjee, Kousani Banerjee, Rajesh Bhatt, Egocentric Questions in Bangla, In Proceedings of the 41 st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41), eds. Nikolas Webster, Yağmur Kiper, Richard Wang, and Sichen Larry Lyu, Cascadilla Press, (2025), pp. 59-66.
  • Arka Banerjee, Kousani Banerjee, Rajesh Bhatt, Egocentric questions: The view from Bangla and Hindi-Urdu, In Proceedings of the 13 th (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ((F)ASAL 13), eds. Samopriya Basu, Aaditya Kulkarni, (2024), pp. 17-36.
  • Kousani Banerjee, On the semantics of multiple wh-exclamatives in Bangla, In Proceedings of the 27th Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB 27), eds. Maria Onoeva, Anna Staňková and Radek Šimík, (2023), pp. 33-51. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1051
  • Anushree Mishra, Kousani Banerjee, Indefinites and polar disjoint interrogatives, In Proceedings of the 24th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG 24), 2022 Linearization,eds. Tae Sik Kim, and Jungu Kang, (2023), pp. 121-131.
  • Kousani Banerjee, Wh-exclamatives call for a question semantics: the view from Bangla, In Proceedings of the 30th edition of the Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE 30), eds. Annie Holtz, Iva Kovač and Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, (2022), pp. 125-
    144.
  • Kousani Banerjee, Arka Banerjee, The role of -i-na in Bangla ki-exclamatives, In Proceedings of the 11th (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages (F)ASAL 11, eds. Samir Alam, Yash Sinha and Sadhwi Srinivas, (2022), pp. 1-14.

REFERRED PRESENTATIONS

  • Presented the paper titled Revisiting headedness in Bangla: towards a head-final analysis and CP- adjunction with Saurov Syed and Arka Banerjee at the 14 th Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages (FASAL 14), (2024), Stony Brook University, New York.
  • Presented the poster titled Egocentric Questions in Bangla: rhetorical or information-seeking, but always surprising with Arka Banerjee and Rajesh Bhatt at the 41 st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 41), (2023), University of California, Santa Cruz.
  • Presented the paper titled Egocentric Questions in Bangla with Rajesh Bhatt and Arka Banerjee at the 13 th (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ((F)ASAL 13), (2023), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
  • Presented the paper titled On the semantics of Multiple Wh-exclamatives in Bangla at the 37 th annual conference of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics (IATL 37), (2022), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
  • Presented the poster titled Indefinites and polar disjoint interrogatives with Anushree Mishra at the 15 th Conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 15), (2022), University of Udine, Italy.
  • Presented the paper titled On the semantics of Multiple Wh-exclamatives in Bangla at the 27 th Sinnund Bedeutung (SuB 27), (2022), Charles University, Prague.
  • Presented the paper titled Indefinites and Polar Disjoint Interrogatives with Anushree Mishra at the 24 th Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG 24), (2022), Korea.
  • Presented the paper titled Wh-exclamatives call for a question semantics: the view from Bangla at the 30 th edition of the Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE 30), (2022), Université de Nantes, France.
  • Presented the paper titled Negative what-exclamatives in Bangla with Arka Banerjee at the 11 th (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ((F)ASAL 11), (2021), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
  • Presented the paper titled The universal perfect (U-perfect) formation and the ordering of temporal adverbials in Bangla at the 46 th All India Conference of Dravidian Linguists (AICDL 46), (2018), Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

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