Page 193 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

'The world is difficult to understand.'
b) Derivational morphology

All the verbs in Bhojpuri in perfect participle forms, already discussed, are
verbal adjectives. Moreover, some verbal nouns and verbal adjectives are derived by
suffixing the verb-stems directly. They are featured as here under.

(i) Verbal nouns
Some verb stems are used as nouns without affixation but sometimes they

occur semantically different from each other. So, they seem to be the same in form
but completely different in meaning. So, they can also be treated as polysemic verb

roots semantically, as shown in (65).
(65) Verbal stems used as nouns

Stems Verb Verbal nouns
पी /pi/ 'drink' 'husbabd'
जी /ji/ 'live' 'mind'

रट /rʌʈ/ 'repeat' 'repetition'

िलख /likʰ/ 'write' 'league, egg of louse'
काट /kɑʈ/ 'cut' 'option'

मार /mɑr/ 'hit or kill' 'aim, stroke'

जान /jɑn/ 'know' 'life'
मान /mɑn/ 'believe, suppose' 'honour'

Besides these, there are some nouns in Bhojpuri used as verbs without any

morphological or semantic change: सोच /soc/ 'thought/think', रीझ /riȷ ̈ / 'satisfaction/be
satisfied', िपलुआ /piluɑ/ 'insect/be insected'. Moreover, there are morphological

derivations of nouns from verbs, already discussed in 6.1.1. But Bhojpuri has the
reverse derivations, i.e., verbs from nouns, as shown in (66a-e):

(66) Noun to verb
Nouns Derived verbs
a. बात बितआ

bɑt bʌtiɑ

bɑt bɑt-iɑ

matter matter-VD

'matter' 'talk'

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