Page 9 - A GRAMMAR OF BHOJPURI _ PhD Dissertation 2020 TU

ABSTRACT

This study presents a grammar of Bhojpuri within the framework of the functional-
typological grammar with adaptive approach developed by T. Givόn (2001a & b and

2009). Bhojpuri is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the districts of central Tarai
(Madhesh); namely, Sarlahi, Rautahat, Bara, Parsa, Chitwan, Nawalparasi (East and West

of Susta) and Rupandehi in Nepal as well as in the adjacent Indian territories of Western
Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh, and other provinces, too. It is also spoken as mother

tongue worldwide, due to indentured labour in the past and foreign employment
contemporarily. The main goal of this study is to analyze the forms and functions of

different grammatical categories of the Bhojpuri language and compare them to the
characteristic structural features of Indo-Aryan languages from the typological
perspectives. Mainly based on the field study, this grammar examines morphosyntactic

structures manifesting the relationship between linguistic forms and functions at both
sentence and discourse levels of the form of Bara-Parsa variety of Bhojpuri.

The study is organized into 16 chapters. Chapter 1 presents major objectives of the study,

literature review and significance and limitations of the study. Chapter 2 deals with the
theoretical framework of the study. Chapter 3 discusses some sociolinguistic aspects as

background information. Chapters 4-14 deal with different aspects of grammar of the
language, viz., phonology, morphophonology, word classes, simple verbal clauses and
argument structure, grammatical relations and case-marking, noun phrases and word

order, tense, aspect and modality, non-declarative speech-acts, marked topics and
contrastive focus, inter-clausal and referential coherence. Chapter 15 deals with

typological implications of the study. Chapter 16 presents summary and conclusions.

This study has revealed a number of interesting features of the Bhojpuri language. This
language is used in different domains of language use with positive attitude of the

speech community. East-west areal dialectal variations occur in the language along with
ethnic and religious ones. There are 36 consonants and 8 oral vowels with their nasal

counterparts in Bhojpuri. Bhojpuri presents different strategies such as deletion, raising,
assimilation and coalescence between the preceding and succeeding segments during

word formation. Morphosyntactically, Bhojpuri consistently displays nominative-
accusative case-marking system. The case-markers are postpositional, but suffixed with
pronominals. Tense-aspect-modality agreement markers are suffixal in Bhojpuri.

Regular word order in Bhojpuri clauses is SOV with flexibility for different pragmatic

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