A Grammar of Dangaura Tharu
Krishna Prasad Paudyal
Tribhuvan University
A Grammar of Dangaura Tharu is a descriptive presentation of Dangaura Tharu spoken primarily in Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Surkhet, Kailali, and Kanchanpur districts of Nepal. Organized in eleven chapters, it has analysed the sociolinguistic situation, and the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic structures of the language.
Dangaura Tharu exhibits six basic vowel and 34 consonant sounds. It is a nominative-accusative language where the argument in S/A slot is always unmarked and the one in O slot is always marked. It has two number system- singular and plural- and the plural markers are -ʌn and hũkrʌ. It follows the dative subject construction for experiencer subjects. Dangaura Tharu is unique in its personal pronouns- ṭʌĩ, ṭũ, ʌpnʌ- especially in the second person, with three levels of honorificity. It exhibits three tense system with distinct tense markers -ṭ and -ṭʰ in the present, -n and -l in the past and -m, -h, and -b in the future. It is a verb final language attesting SOV constituent order, though sentence modification and displacement are possible for contrastive focus. As proposed here, Dangaura Tharu genetically belongs to the Bihari group within the Eastern group of languages that falls under the outer sub-branch of Indo-Aryan language family.
ISBN 9783969390894 (hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 56. 436pp. 2022.
