The paper explores the nexus between rhyme, rhythm and happiness in Bengali chharas while justifying the latter as the defining attribute of the verses. Chharas are short, happy Bengali rhymes. Elementary chharas, particularly, are designed for children yet to grow language and social awareness and manifest as affectionate interpersonal interactions between a caregiver and a child. The children's positive responses to these verses, despite their maturity, indicate the embedded joy being well grasped. Given this background, rhyme and rhythm are observed to make the language playful, enhancing the children's appreciation and involvement with the verses while contributing to the chharas’ happiness quotient. Through a discourse pragmatic methodology that emphasizes the speaker, listener and their interpersonal relationships, the various sources of fun and happiness in elementary chharas are analyzed, and the crucial contribution of rhyme and rhythm in determining pleasure and delight in elementary chharas is thus established.

The present paper aims to explain the process of meaning making in Bengali elementary Choras (children’s nursery rhymes) by their intended target audience, little children, who are yet to develop their semantic, cognitive or linguistic skills. Chora, the Bengali oral folkloric counterpart of nonsensical verses for children, can be characterised as a type of dynamic discourse where socio-cultural elements occur abundantly though asymmetrically. Outlined by intermittent cohesive gaps, such discourses are however found to be thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated by the little children, despite their lack of prior textual and/or contextual awareness. Following this, it is observed that such rhymes or Choras are more about experiencing amusement that the children derive from the verses rather than understanding their denotative or connotative sense. Meaning making of such rhymes by the little children, we claim, occur not through the processing of semantics of the text but by directly experiencing the communicative intent of the discourse. Coherence of such dynamic and discontinuous discourses is therefore attained when their pragmatic intent, that is enjoyment - intertwined in the verses, is identified by the little children and reciprocated through affirmation. The analysis detects the predominance of coherence constructed at the discourse level and accordingly the methodology adopted to explain cognizance in elementary Choras is the theory of Discourse Coherence (Wang and Guo, 2014) which claims that coherence in discourse can be achieved jointly by the discourse producer as well as the receiver.