Polyfunctional <i>heri</i> (হৰ) in Assamese: a view from Discourse Grammar

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.