Thesis Chapters by Gopal Thakur
Unpublished doctoral dissertation submitted in Tribhuvan University
This study presents a grammar of Bhojpuri within the framework of the functional-typological gram... more 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 uses. Non-verbal predicates are significantly used for present habitual. Passivization, reflexivization and causativization are primarily morphological in Bhojpuri. A noun phrase consists of a single noun or pronoun as the simplex one and with other elements as the complex. Bhojpuri displays two genders, two numbers and three degrees of honorificity inherent in as well as marked with nouns and finite verbs morphologically. The relative clauses occur in externally and internally headed or headless position under strategies of a gap, pronoun retention and use of different correlative pronouns to relativize different grammatical relations. The non-declarative speech acts in Bhojpuri include interrogative with polar, constituent and negative polarity questions, and manipulative with imperative and hortative constructions. Reflexive, reciprocals, insertion of dative, benefactive or associative arguments and passive constructions are used in de-transitive voices. EPCs, Y-movement, left and right dislocations, dative-shifting and raising may be utilized in marked topic constructions as well as affixes and quantifiers, contrastive strength, reference and topicality, negation and polar questions in contrastive focus. The subordinate adverbial clauses are generally marked through the special non-finite verb forms in Bhojpuri. Conjoined clauses exhibit the conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative relationships among themselves and express rejection and cause too. Complement-taking verbs include perception-cognition-utterance, modality and manipulation verbs. The referential coherence is encoded by the morphological devices in terms of grammar of pronouns and the grammatical agreement. Bhojpuri displays a number of typologically interesting features similar to and different from its neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages.
This study has also revealed some striking features in the language. They may include aspirate sonorants, triphthongization, phonemic word-stress, smaller to greater order of counting upto 200, declension of adverbs in word-formation as well as for emphasis, development of genuine prefixes and infixes, allocutive agreement and absence of gender marking (in eastern variety), use of present tense copula bɑ with its negative counterpart nʌikʰe, verbless utterances in proverbs and relative clauses and clause-final plural maker particle sʌ, sʌn and jɑ with a consistent nominative-accusative pattern.
The annexes include details of sociolinguistic data collection and informants in the study, map of the common Bhojpuri speech zones in Nepal and India, tables of distribution of consonants and vowel sequence and samples of the analyzed texts, followed by references.
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Thesis Chapters by Gopal Thakur
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 uses. Non-verbal predicates are significantly used for present habitual. Passivization, reflexivization and causativization are primarily morphological in Bhojpuri. A noun phrase consists of a single noun or pronoun as the simplex one and with other elements as the complex. Bhojpuri displays two genders, two numbers and three degrees of honorificity inherent in as well as marked with nouns and finite verbs morphologically. The relative clauses occur in externally and internally headed or headless position under strategies of a gap, pronoun retention and use of different correlative pronouns to relativize different grammatical relations. The non-declarative speech acts in Bhojpuri include interrogative with polar, constituent and negative polarity questions, and manipulative with imperative and hortative constructions. Reflexive, reciprocals, insertion of dative, benefactive or associative arguments and passive constructions are used in de-transitive voices. EPCs, Y-movement, left and right dislocations, dative-shifting and raising may be utilized in marked topic constructions as well as affixes and quantifiers, contrastive strength, reference and topicality, negation and polar questions in contrastive focus. The subordinate adverbial clauses are generally marked through the special non-finite verb forms in Bhojpuri. Conjoined clauses exhibit the conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative relationships among themselves and express rejection and cause too. Complement-taking verbs include perception-cognition-utterance, modality and manipulation verbs. The referential coherence is encoded by the morphological devices in terms of grammar of pronouns and the grammatical agreement. Bhojpuri displays a number of typologically interesting features similar to and different from its neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages.
This study has also revealed some striking features in the language. They may include aspirate sonorants, triphthongization, phonemic word-stress, smaller to greater order of counting upto 200, declension of adverbs in word-formation as well as for emphasis, development of genuine prefixes and infixes, allocutive agreement and absence of gender marking (in eastern variety), use of present tense copula bɑ with its negative counterpart nʌikʰe, verbless utterances in proverbs and relative clauses and clause-final plural maker particle sʌ, sʌn and jɑ with a consistent nominative-accusative pattern.
The annexes include details of sociolinguistic data collection and informants in the study, map of the common Bhojpuri speech zones in Nepal and India, tables of distribution of consonants and vowel sequence and samples of the analyzed texts, followed by references.
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 uses. Non-verbal predicates are significantly used for present habitual. Passivization, reflexivization and causativization are primarily morphological in Bhojpuri. A noun phrase consists of a single noun or pronoun as the simplex one and with other elements as the complex. Bhojpuri displays two genders, two numbers and three degrees of honorificity inherent in as well as marked with nouns and finite verbs morphologically. The relative clauses occur in externally and internally headed or headless position under strategies of a gap, pronoun retention and use of different correlative pronouns to relativize different grammatical relations. The non-declarative speech acts in Bhojpuri include interrogative with polar, constituent and negative polarity questions, and manipulative with imperative and hortative constructions. Reflexive, reciprocals, insertion of dative, benefactive or associative arguments and passive constructions are used in de-transitive voices. EPCs, Y-movement, left and right dislocations, dative-shifting and raising may be utilized in marked topic constructions as well as affixes and quantifiers, contrastive strength, reference and topicality, negation and polar questions in contrastive focus. The subordinate adverbial clauses are generally marked through the special non-finite verb forms in Bhojpuri. Conjoined clauses exhibit the conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative relationships among themselves and express rejection and cause too. Complement-taking verbs include perception-cognition-utterance, modality and manipulation verbs. The referential coherence is encoded by the morphological devices in terms of grammar of pronouns and the grammatical agreement. Bhojpuri displays a number of typologically interesting features similar to and different from its neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages.
This study has also revealed some striking features in the language. They may include aspirate sonorants, triphthongization, phonemic word-stress, smaller to greater order of counting upto 200, declension of adverbs in word-formation as well as for emphasis, development of genuine prefixes and infixes, allocutive agreement and absence of gender marking (in eastern variety), use of present tense copula bɑ with its negative counterpart nʌikʰe, verbless utterances in proverbs and relative clauses and clause-final plural maker particle sʌ, sʌn and jɑ with a consistent nominative-accusative pattern.
The annexes include details of sociolinguistic data collection and informants in the study, map of the common Bhojpuri speech zones in Nepal and India, tables of distribution of consonants and vowel sequence and samples of the analyzed texts, followed by references.