My research has followed the question of the nature and possibility of communication in certain areas.

The focus has been on four themes.

Firstly, with elements of language critique from Bakhtin, Wittgenstein and Derrida, I exposed the conceptual difficulties of describing grammatical categories on a general cross-linguistic basis, limiting the investigation to verbal aspect in Slavic and Indic languages.

Secondly, the application of Wittgenstein and Derrida to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity has led to the first comprehensive solution to the paradoxes it presents, explained as resulting from structuralist assumptions about language from an earlier age. See Chatterjee, "Reading Whorf through Wittgenstein: A Solution to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," Lingua 67: 37-63.

Thirdly, my inquiry into Nietzsche's linguistic thought as a once Professor of Philology demonstrates that modern linguistics is built on the repression or total neglect of Nietzsche's insights into grammar, word meaning, metaphor, and reference. These insights were on the other hand all well utilized by poststructuralists like Derrida to bring about the postmodern revolution (in turn, this change through poststructuralist thought on language is also repressed by the discipline of linguistics). As a modernist enterprise, the discipline of linguistics grew and survived by avoiding any encounter with Nietzsche in the 19th century or Wittgenstein and Derrida in the 20th. See Chatterjee, "Before and Beyond Linguistics: The Case of Professor Nietzsche, Philologist," in Tropic Crucible.

Lastly, having initially seen Wittgenstein as consonant with Indian Buddhist philosophy, I found that significant ignored passages in Wittgenstein's notes, and in remarks in conversation with friends provided crucial Judaic allusions. Explaining these with reference to Wittgenstein's entire opus occupied me for two decades. I consulted authorities in relevant areas and gained Derrida's personal endorsement of my approach to Wittgenstein after he read early drafts and we discussed them in 1991. He wrote me a testimonial and remarked that the concealed Judaism of Wittgenstein reminded him of his own life. (The acceptance of my book for publication unfortunately later coincided in time with his final illness and death. Since then, of course, his remarks to me about his own work have been borne out by several extended works). My reading of Wittgenstein's entire project as an indirect artistic act of concealed allusion and pointing to Jewish tradition, relating language to ethics without speaking directly of ethics, was the result of years of study and research and appeared finally in 2005 as Wittgenstein and Judaism: a Triumph of Concealment (New York: Peter Lang).