Page 10 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

uses. Non-verbal predicates are significantly used for present habitual. Passivization,
reflexivization and causativization are primarily morphological in Bhojpuri. A noun

phrase consists of a single noun or pronoun as the simplex one and with other elements
as the complex. Bhojpuri displays two genders, two numbers and three degrees of
honorificity inherent in as well as marked with nouns and finite verbs morphologically.

The relative clauses occur in externally and internally headed or headless position under
strategies of a gap, pronoun retention and use of different correlative pronouns to

relativize different grammatical relations. The non-declarative speech acts in Bhojpuri
include interrogative with polar, constituent and negative polarity questions, and

manipulative with imperative and hortative constructions. Reflexive, reciprocals,
insertion of dative, benefactive or associative arguments and passive constructions are

used in de-transitive voices. EPCs, Y-movement, left and right dislocations, dative-
shifting and raising may be utilized in marked topic constructions as well as affixes and
quantifiers, contrastive strength, reference and topicality, negation and polar questions

in contrastive focus. The subordinate adverbial clauses are generally marked through
the special non-finite verb forms in Bhojpuri. Conjoined clauses exhibit the

conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative relationships among themselves and express
rejection and cause too. Complement-taking verbs include perception-cognition-
utterance, modality and manipulation verbs. The referential coherence is encoded by the

morphological devices in terms of grammar of pronouns and the grammatical
agreement. Bhojpuri displays a number of typologically interesting features similar to

and different from its neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages.

This study has also revealed some striking features in the language. They may include
aspirate sonorants, triphthongization, phonemic word-stress, smaller to greater order of

counting upto 200, declension of adverbs in word-formation as well as for emphasis,
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 particle sʌ, sʌn and jɑ with a consistent nominative-accusative pattern.

The annexes include details of sociolinguistic data collection and informants in the
study, map of the common Bhojpuri speech zones in Nepal and India, tables of

distribution of consonants and vowel sequence and samples of the analyzed texts,
followed by references.

vii