A Grammar of Bhojpuri
Gopal Thakur
Linguistic Society of Nepal
This is a grammar of Bhojpuri within the framework of the functional-typological and adaptive approaches to grammar developed by T. Givόn. Bhojpuri, an Indo-Aryan language, is spoken mainly in the districts of central Madhesh (Sarlahi-Rupandehi) in Nepal and the adjacent Indian territories of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with other provinces, too. Global migration has also spread it worldwide. This grammar analyzes the forms and functions of different grammatical categories of the language and compares them to the characteristic structural features of Indo-Aryan languages in the framework. Mainly based on the field study, this grammar examines morphosyntactic structures manifesting the relationship between linguistic forms and functions at both sentence and discourse levels of the form mainly from the Bara-Parsa variety of Bhojpuri.
Besides a long grammar-writing tradition, this grammar is the first, written in the way of Bhojpuri, displaying aspirate sonorants, triphthongization, phonemic word-stress, smaller to greater order of counting, declension of adverbs, development of genuine prefixes and infixes, allocutive agreement and absence of gender marking (in eastern variety), use of present tense copula bɑ with its negative counterpart nʌikʰe, verbless utterances in proverbs and relative clauses and clause-final plural maker particles sʌ, sʌn and jɑ with a consistent nominative-accusative pattern.
ISBN 9783969392331 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Indo-European Linguistics 55. 404pp. 2021.
