Page 591 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

Though Grierson (1903a:8) mentions the Bihari group to have a copula बाटे

/bɑʈe/ in present tense, it is the unique property of Bhojpuri with its negative
counterpart नइखे /nʌikʰe/. Verbs in the NIA languages are suffixed for tense, aspect,

modality, number, gender and honorificity at the same time, already discussed in
Chapter 9 with reference to Bhojpuri.

The NIA adverbs are also inflected with suffixes generally for exclusive and
inclusive emphasis. Clitic -ए /-e/ is an exclusive emphatic marker and -ओ /-o/ an

inclusive emphatic marker suffix in Maithili, Bhojpuri and Awadhi. Clitic -ए /-e/ is an

outcome of grammaticalization from different source word classes, so, it is
multifunctional, already discussed in Chapter 6.2. Hindi has independent particle ही

/ɦi/ 'only' and भी /b ̤ i/ 'also' respectively, whereas Nepali replaces them as -अइ /-ʌi/ as a

suffix as well as नै /nʌi/ and पिन /pʌni/ as independent particles for the same.

Suffixing numerals in NIA languages is not so common. But in the languages

they are suffixed with are observed with classifiers. The classifiers so far are -गो /-ɡo/
in Bhojpuri, -टा /-ʈɑ/ in Maithili, -ठू /ʈʰu/ in Awadhi and -ओटा /-oʈɑ/ in Nepali in

general. Hindi uses classifier ठो /ʈʰo/ as a separate word. Bhojpuri also has जने /jʌne/

to classify human honorific as its close neighbours Maithili, Awadhi and Nepali do.
Hindi uses लोग /loɡ/ instead.

The general nominal inflectional categories in the NIA languages are gender,

number, case and definiteness. Case is universal in all the languages while gender is
not. Bhojpuri nouns are inflected for all the inflectional categories, already discussed
in Chapter 6.1.

b) Prefix
Though Verma (2003:574) mentions Bhojpuri having all inflectional elements

in terms of suffixes, Masica (1991:215) mentions presence of a few derivational
prefixes in Indo-Aryan, most of them borrowed from either Sanskrit or Persian, which
Bhojpuri belongs to. Thus, some prefixal elements have also been common in the

language especially for nouns and adjectives. Such prefixes are generally used for
antonymy as well as for comparison, as shown in Table 15.7.

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