A Grammar of Chitoniya Tharu
Paudyal Krishna Prasad
Tribhuvan University
This study presents a grammatical description of the Chitoniya Tharu insightfully guided by the Functional Typological Grammar framework developed by Talmy Givón (1984 & 2001). The Chitoniya Tharu is a previously poorly described and undocumented Indo-Aryan language spoken in Chitwan and Nawalparasi districts of Nepal by an ethnic group called 'Tharu'. This grammatical description covers the area of phonology, morphology, syntax, and discourse analysis.
Chitoniya Tharu has 34 consonant and 6 basic vowel phonemes. It is a nominative-accusative language in which the nominative case is always unmarked and the dative case is always marked with -ke. Unlike most of the NIA languages, the experiencer subject is always genitive case marked. It exhibits three tenses with distinct markers for each tense. The verb agreement is triggered by the number, person and honorificity of the nominative subject. It is a left-branching and dependent marking language with the basic SOV constituent order. However, it does exhibit displacement processes like L- or R-dislocation, topicalization, and scrambling, and the valence adjusting processes like passivization and causativization. Although both syndetic and asyndetic coordination are attested, asyndetic coordination is preferred in this language. It does exhibit subordinate clauses like complement clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses.
ISBN 9783862885794 (Hardbound). LINCOM Grammar Handbooks 02. 546pp. 2014.
