Dr. Pabitra Sarkar's paper in Prof. M. B. Emeneau Centenary International Conference on South Asian Linguistics is titled "Abuses In Indian Languages: A Linguistic Study With Special Focus On Bangla".

        Pabitra Sarkar begins his paper by underlining the difference between the abuses and expletives. He maintains that although verbal abuses do not fall within the normal uses of the langauge4 yet they are important as a part of our understanding of language. He refers to abuses as being dependent on contents, cultural, interpersonal and dialectal. He illustrates these points by giving examples from Mencken, Michael Madhusudhan Dutta, etc.

       In the second part of his paper, Sarkar goes on to say that abuses violate all principles that Grice (1975) speaks of , but they are still part of language use in general. Two categories of abuses in Bangla and some North Indian languages are given- one, those created by phonological change of word shape, and the other those consisting of words or their combinations. In the third part, regarding Indian abusive terms, he says that there are abuses made of single words or word groups which are used as epithets of the targeted persons. Moreover, he talks about that have no basis of truth in what is being said about the target, abuses pertaining to the illegitimacy of the target's birth or unnatural sexual relationships. In the fourth part, Pabitra Sarkar shows the role of metaphors in the verbal abuses categorizing them into animate consisting of groups, relatives, birds and animals, and fictitious creatures and inanimate including parts of the parts of the body and objects. In the fifth and last parts he explains how compounds are complemented by collocations, which takes us to the syntax of such abuses. Abuses are placed in sentences and these sentences present themselves in several categories- wishes (of the speaker), orders, etc.

       In the discussion that followed the session, chaired by Martina Ghosh - Schellhorn, Prof. Hans Henrich Hock, opened the discussion with a suggestion that the study on abuses in Indian languages might be good to extend India as a linguistic area. Prof. Ashok. R. Kelkar gave an anecdote making the point of caste based abuses, common to India , have no equivalent in many other countries. Prof. Bhattacharya observed that there may be bi-dilectal situations taken into account as far as abuses are concerned. Considering the example of 'magi' he said that it was restricted to certain areas where it carries a pejorative connotation and on the other hand it thrives with its earlier meaning elsewhere. Prof. Sachdeva added that the Nagas have no sexual abuses in their community.