Page 604 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

16.1.5 Syntactic features
Syntactically, Bhojpuri nouns occupy the subject, direct object, indirect object,

nominal predicate, possessive noun modifier, complement and locative noun phrase
position. Bhojpuri verbs may be classified in different groups in terms of clause
structure and argument structure. Non-verbal predicates in Bhojpuri are nominal

predicates, adjectival predicates and locative expressions. Besides these, existentials
and possessives are the other copular or copula-like expressions in Bhojpuri. The

nominal predicates in Bhojpuri sometimes occur without an overt copula in present
tense whereas when a clause predicates the time reference other than the present, the
copula verb is employed. The adjectival and locative copular clauses take the copula ह

/ɦʌ/ or बा /bɑ/ 'be' inflected to encode tense, aspect and participant reference marking
morphemes. The verbal predicates in Bhojpuri may be divided in terms of transitivity.

Basic differences are found in intransitive, transitive and bi-transitive predicates. All
of these types may be divided as encoding indirect objects. Further, modality verbs,

manipulation verbs and perception-cognition-utterance (P-C-U) verbs in Bhojpuri are
characterized by clausal complements of different types. Some predicates in Bhojpuri

exhibit multiple memberships due to valance patterns for conjunct verb constructions.
The grammatical relations play a vital role not only in the grammar of simple clauses

but also in major syntactic processes. The nominal morphology as coding property
presents a consistent nominative pattern of control 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) in complement clauses displays the
nominative control. 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 pragmatically oriented nominative-accusative case-marking strategy.

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