Page 294 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

focus was centred on the way the grammatical relations are encoded as well as on the
pattern of syntactic control in major rule governed syntactic processes in Bhojpuri.

We discussed the overt coding properties of grammatical relations, i.e., nominal
morphology and verb agreement. The nominal morphology presents a consistent
nominative pattern of control as coding property in Bhojpuri. The pronominal verb

agreement as well as the number, gender and honorificity agreement also follows the
nominative pattern. The unmarked word order in Bhojpuri clause is SOV but not

rigid. Besides, the changed word order remains following the nominative pattern.
Under behaviour and control properties, promotion to or demotion from direct object

does not affect the regular nominative pattern but passivization does so.
Reflexivization and causativization are applicable to subject GR in Bhojpuri. The

Equi-NP deletion (or the co-referent deletion) displays the nominative control in
complement clauses. The use of zero anaphora in chained clauses is a pronominal
device to mark co-reference in clause-chaining, confined to the subject GR in

Bhojpuri. However, in Bhojpuri, relativization does not play any role for controlling
the grammatical relations. Bhojpuri also displays pronominal verb agreement in first,

second and third person pronouns with two numbers and dual genders. Bhojpuri
employs nominative-accusative case-marking strategy, i.e., pragmatically oriented.

Different postpositions are used in Bhojpuri for case marking with nouns but
pronouns are generally suffixed as well as followed by post positions for the same

purpose. The cases nominative, accusative, dative, instrumental, genitive, locative,
ablative and comitative are marked to code syntactic relations of the NP to the finite
verb in a clause. The inanimate patient is zero marked whereas the animate and

pronominal patients are marked morphologically. Bhojpuri has the dative subject
construction as one of the characteristics of the New Indo-Aryan languages.

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