NOUN CLASSIFIER IN KOKBOROK

Kokborok is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodo-Garo subgroup spoken mainly in Tripura, India, with speakers also found in Assam, Mizoram, and Bangladesh. A notable grammatical feature of the language is its rich system of noun classifiers, which are obligatorily used with numerals in counting expressions. This paper offers a descriptive analysis of noun classifiers in Kokborok by examining their semantic basis, morphological form, syntactic distribution, and grammatical function within the noun phrase. The study combines examples from published sources with the descriptive framework of earlier grammars and recent articles on Kokborok noun structure and classifiers. The analysis shows that Kokborok classifiers are independent morphemes, usually monosyllabic, and that they classify nouns according to semantic features such as shape, animacy, quantity, material, and part-whole relations. The paper also shows that the preferred pattern is noun + classifier + numeral, while classifier + numeral + noun is also possible in certain discourse contexts. Overall, the classifier system plays a central role in Kokborok nominal grammar and reflects both typological patterns common to Tibeto-Burman languages and language-specific semantic organization.languageinindia+2