A Comparative study of the Classifiers '-ta' in Bangla and '-the' in Bhojpuri

The paper provides a detailed comparative study of the properties of two particular Classifiers from two Indo-Aryan Languages; the Bangla Classifier '-ta' and the Bhojpuri Classifier '-tless thansupgreater thanhless than/supgreater thane'. The two languages Bhojpuri and Bangla share a lot of Linguistic resemblance that motivated me to conduct a relative study of their Classifier system. Although the Bangla Classifier system has been thoroughly researched, the properties of the Bhojpuri Classifier system are yet to be documented. Both '-ta' in Bangla and '-tless thansupgreater thanhless than/supgreater thane' in Bhojpuri are Numeral Classifiers that attach with the Numeral preceding the Nominal entity in Cardinal DPs regardless of the gender, animacy, shape or size of the Nominal. The paper reveals the comparison between the two Classifiers in terms of their syntactic structure, compatibility with other elements in the DP, occurrence and absence in different environments etc.