Introduction

Postposition is one of the most important linguistic components of the grammar of the Bengali language. ‘Use of postposition to denote case relations is found in IA, Kol and Dravidian’ (Chatterji, [1926] 1993). Proper understanding of form and function of postpositions used in modern Bengali texts carries tremendous linguistic advantages in understanding the language in its present form and usage. In a general sense, what is preposition in English is postposition in Bengali (and in many other Indian languages) as these two unique linguistic elements exhibit close similarities in syntactic–semantic functions although they occur in two different positions in the sentence in the respective languages. It is ‘useful to treat postpositions as a word class in Bangla, not only to help foreign learners, but also because many of the locative noun forms or perfective participles concerned have changed or expanded their meaning in their use as postpositions’ (Thompson, 2010).

Although postpositions used in modern Bengali texts are functionally similar to prepositions used in English, the prepositions are used before nouns and pronouns in English (e.g., of father, in house, by hands, in morning, at station, etc.) while postpositions in Bengali are usually used immediately after nouns and pronouns in sentence.