Prof. Tanmoy Bhattacharya represents the Department of Linguistics, University of Delhi in Prof. M. B. Emeneau Centenary International Conference on South Asian Linguistics. The paper presented by him is titled " India not as a Linguistic Area: an Insight from Minimalism" in which he proposes to explore the real possibility for the first time to derive the differences from within each concerned language, which he claims as ' Minimalist Way '. In other words this paper proposes to discover the pressure points created in a language which erupts into these so-called inter-language differences and to locate these pressure points at the interfaces.

          He places before the reader the plausibility of debunking the UG and asserts that it is high time to rethink the role of UG in the theory of grammar. Prof. Bhattacharya aims to show that it may perhaps be time to consider going beyond the idea of UG as it is formalized. He presents the Boas-Sapir debate to establish his claims and says that Boas's works is as definitive a statement one can get against the notion of UG, the "truth" and this is the driving force behind the enterprise of typology and areal linguistics in general. Prof. Bhattacharya asserts that typology is meaningless unless we also find a syntactic explanation for the facts listed by the typologist.

           Stressing his observation that India is not a linguistic area, Prof. Bhattacharya presents examples from complement clauses in Bangla/Hindi-Urdu. He says that differences begin to appear when one looks at the relative mobility of the complement clause in these languages. He asserts that without the syntactic explanation of the differences quoted by him, they will be meaningless. Another area where the two languages seem to substantially differ and where yet again the difference in principle is of an entirely different nature than parametric differences is the domain of Wh scope, for which there is no scope in Hindi/Urdu unless the complex Wh expression is used.

           Prof. Bhattacharya presents the crucial syntactic differences between closely related languages which may be reducible to parametric differences and that mere listing of these differences is rarely useful. He elaborates his findings through the examples like DP-International Universals where H-Final languages show NP movement rather than N movement inside the DP, asymmetry and antisymmetry frameworks, movements of the complements and others.

           He suggests that pressure points created in each language be discovered, which derives the form and shape of specific constructions or of specific syntactic features, seen otherwise as the so-called inter-language differences. Prof. Bhattacharya defines the interfaces, the need for classifiers and cleft in connection to them to prove his points.

           In conclusion, the paper hopes that the cases discussed in it show why these typical syntactic constructions in each language are a result of some tectonic movement within the language concerned and nothing to do with parameters or observable differences between neighboring or genealogically related languages. The paper claims that these movements within a language are a result of pressure through the interfaces.

           In the discussion that followed the session, chaired by Prof. Bh. Krishnamurti, was initiated by Prof. Rajendra Singh with the suggestion that it needs steps to look up the debate expressed in this paper. Prof. Milind Malshe enquired that if Prof. Bhattacharya was suggesting interaction between pragmatic competence and grammatical competence; he further asked that what the stand of this presentation regarding Chomsky postulates was. Prof. Bhattacharya replied that what we need is a well arranged syntax including grammatical and pragmatic interferences. Prof. Anoop Mahajan commented on the morphological differences and parametric values and criticized certain ideas of Prof. Bhattacharya. Prof. Pabitra Sarkar raised a question regarding the classifier example of Bangla given in the paper and suggested that this kind of fact was also present in other languages like Japanese.

           Prof. Bh Krishnamurti, the Chairperson remarked on the acceptance and criticism of Universal Grammar.