Page 588 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

Going through Table 15.4 and Table 15.5 we observe that Bhojpuri maintains
the major NIA features in general and has acquired a few unique features yet to be

explored in other NIA languages. In terms of the phonological inverntories, Bhojpuri
has the same number of the stops, affricates and glides as its close neighbours do
have. But other consonants and vowels do not match with its neighbours. Moreover,

devoicing sonorant contrasts in consonants, triphthongs and phonemic stress observed
in Bhojpuri have not been explored in its other neighbours.

In this section, we went through the 36 consonants in terms of stops, nasals,
laterals, flaps, fricatives, affricates and semi-vowels with their characteristics of

voicing, aspiration and devoicing sonority; the 8 monopthongs with their nasal
counterparts with diphthongs and triphthongs in Bhojpuri; its syllable canon with

characteristics of schwa deletion, reduction of gemination, loss of nasal and clusters
also presented characters of Bhojpuri in comparision to the NIA and Bihari
chacteristics in Table 15.4 as well as to its close neighbours in Table 15.5. These all

phenomena attest NIA characteristics of Bhojpuri typologically in general with some
of its own functional adaptive inventories, already discussed.

15.2 Morphosyntactic implications
As in phonology, in some features, Bhojpuri maintains the correspondence

with the genetically related languages and in some features it cuts across the NIA
language family as Grierson (1903a; 1903b; 1903c; 1904) states. In many features

Bhojpuri offers the universal patterns.
15.2.1 Affixation
NIA lexical creativity involves suffixes and prefixes to form new word to meet

contemporary needs and such words are generally complex (Masica 1991:81).
Besides, the NIA nominal inflections characterize primarily nouns, pronouns,

adjectives and also certain numerals and adverbs in some languages (Masica
1991:217). Bhojpuri has also followed the usage of prefixes and suffixes along with
infixes too. Such affixation inflects nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs

with nominals in Bhojpuri.

a) Suffix
Grierson (1903a:7) states in broader sense that all the languages of the eastern
group show a greater tendency of the inflexional synthesis than do those of the

western of the NIA. The general suffix -इ /-i/ in the NIA languages mark feminine

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