Page 596 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

Grierson (1903a:8) notes, "the singular possessive pronoun in the east has ओ
/o/ for its medial vowel but in the West it has ए /e/ or आ /ɑ/, e.g., in Bihari 'my' is मोर

/mor/, in Oria मोरा /morɑ/ but in Hindi it is मेरा /merɑ/". Bhojpuri has मोर /mor/ as
frequent occurings in poems and songs.

The pronominal subject in Hindi is obligatory, whereas it is optional in the
eastern group (Grierson 1903a:7). Subbārāo (2012:27) also attests it as a South Asian

characteristic which Bhojpuri goes with.
Masica (1991:337) displays "verbless constructions (N P + N P, N P + Adj)

are normative in eastern NIA and in Sinhalese". Bhojpuri exhibits such constructions,
already discussed in Chapter 7.
Grierson (1903a:8) displays the relative and its connected pronouns ending in

ए /e/ in the east, but usually in ओ /o/ in the west. Bhojpuri follows the eastern pattern,

already discussed in Chapter 13.
The system of affixation discussed in this subsection empirically attests that
Bhojpuri maintains the NIA features to a greater extent but has developed some

peculiar characteristics yet to be explored in its closed neighbours.
15.2.2 Word order

The NIA languages exhibit SOV as a basic word order in the main clauses. The
SOV word order is not only the characteristic feature of the NIA languages but also a

South Asian feature proposed in Masica (1976:190). Subbārāo (2012:28) exhibits
relatively free word order in Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages; a bit less in

Tibeto-Burman. Greenberg (1963) has proposed a number of implicational universals
associated with the basic SOV constituent order. Some of them are as follows:
 There is a strong tendency for possessor noun phrases to precede the possessed

noun phrases in verb-final languages.

 There is a strong tendency for verb-final languages to have postpositions.
 There is a strong tendency for verb-final languages to place relative clause
before the head noun.

 In verb-final languages the modifying element precedes the modified element.

Bhojpuri also follows these universals as an SOV language in its word orders.
The summary of the implicational universals attested in the word orders is given in
Table 15.13.

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