LINGUA POSNANIENSIS 2021 LXIII (1) DoI: 10.2478/linpo-2021-0002 control structures in Kokborok: A case of syntactic convergence Gargi Roy 1 & Rajesh Kumar 1 & Kārumūri V. Subbārāo 2 1 Indian Institute of technology Madras 2 University of hyderabad & Delhi University (retd.) e-mail: gargiroy1286@gmail.com, thisisrajkumar@gmail.com, kvs2811@gmail.com Abstract: Gargi Roy, Rajesh Kumar & Kārumūri V. Subbārāo, Control structures in Kokborok: A case of syntactic convergence. the poznań Society for the advancement of arts and Sciences, pL ISSn 0079-4740, pp. 21-52 this paper presents a descriptive study of the control structures in Kokborok, a tibeto-Burman language spoken in tripura (one of the north-eastern states in India) and demonstrates the contact-induced changes in the phenomenon of control in Kokborok which resulted due to the long-term contact with Bangla (Indo-ary- an), a genetically diferent language spoken in the state. the instances of genitive subject and the phenomenon of overt controllee in the embedded subject position in Kokborok are the cases in point. the instance of overt controllee described in this paper points to the deviation from the classic concept of pRo thereby demonstra- ting a property unique to the study of South asian languages. Keywords: control, copy, convergence, pRo 1. Introduction this paper primarily draws the phenomenon of language contact in tripura in it shows the changing patterns of Kokborok control structures which resulted due to the infuence of Bangla. the phenomenon of language contact between Kokborok and Bangla is not recent as it is several centuries old. the contact situation dates back to the 16 th century when the Manikya kings would promote Bangla in the higher social circle of the royal court and continued even during the era of Rabindranath tagore as tagore had often remained one of the favourite royal guests of the then king of tripura. It became more intense in the aftermath of the Bangladeshi War of Independence in 1971. During the war, there was a huge infux of the Bengali population from Bangladesh to settle mainly © 2021 Gargi Roy & Rajesh Kumar & Kārumūri V. Subbārāo. this is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-noDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).