Page 257 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

CHAPTER 8
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS AND CASE MARKING

8.0 Outline
This chapter deals with the grammatical relations and the case marking system
in Bhojpuri. It consists of three sections. Section 8.1 deals with the grammatical

relations and 8.2 with case marking system. We summarize the findings in the chapter
in section 8.3.

8.1 Grammatical relations
The notion of grammatical relations is broad and ill-defined as this term can

be used to refer to any grammatically dependent relations. However, in practice, it is
used to denote relations between a predicate and its arguments in a clause for which

some linguists use the term 'grammatical relation' or 'grammatical function' as
'syntactic function' (Falk 2006) or 'syntactic role' (Croft 2001). Subject, direct object
and indirect object are the major relational categories among the most basic concepts

of several models of grammar and are often regarded, either explicitly or implicitly, as
universal (cf. Chomsky 1981; Dixon 1994, 2009).

In Bhojpuri, too, grammatical relations are characterized by two major formal
1
properties referred to as coding as well as behavioural properties .
8.1.1 Overt coding properties
The overt coding properties of the grammatical relations are distinct features

of the grammatical code, such as nominal morphology, intonation or word-order. The
overt coding properties of grammatical subjects of those, the most relevant to
grammatical relations universally, are word order (i.e., the NP's position in the clause

vis-a-vis other grammatical relation bearing arguments and the verb), verb agreement
(i.e., the NP's control of pronominal affixes on the verb) and nominal morphology

(i.e., the NP's morphological case-marking). Of such properties, the word order is
syntactic whearas the verb agreement and case-marking are morphological. These
overt coding properties remarkably determine grammatical roles of the clausal

participants. The relevance of such properties to the grammatical relations even in
simple clauses varies from one language to the other, or within the same language

from one case-role to the other (Givón, 2001:175-7). In this section, we examine the
overt coding properties and their relevance to grammatical relations in Bhojpuri.

1. Givón (1997:7) argues that the formal properties of grammatical subjects investigated by Keenan
(1976:324) can be easily extended to grammatical relations in general.
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