Hindi Morphology

by Rajendra Singh and R.K. Agnihotri

This book provides a fairly comprehensive description of the Morphology of Hindi. This description is located in the theory proposed by Ford and Singh. They question some of the most celebrated concepts of morphology and build a theory of morphological relatedness around the word as the basic unit and a set of bidirectional Word Formation Strategies. Morphology is essentially regarded as the study of relationships obtaining among formally and semantically related words. These Word Formation Strategies constitute extremely complex networks of word-relatedness. Access to a single member of a given network can activate the whole network. It examines critically not only the concepts used in traditional morphology but also the work done on Hindi morphology during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In addition to examining intra-and intercategorial relationships among Hindi nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the book includes sections on morphophonemic changes, minimization of morphological marks, non-morphemic morphemes and multiple affixation. RAJENDRA SINGH is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Montreal, Canada. He has published extensively on language-contact, sociolinguistics, phonology, and morphology. R.K. AGNIHOTRI is Professor of Linguistics, University of Delhi. In addition to several research papers in national and international journals, he has published five books. He has also published English translations of Hindi poetry and fiction. His research interests include applied linguistics, socio-linguistics, morphology and translation. In the whole, with a language which has given productive word information (as compared with Sanskrit), it is interesting to observe how morphology is working not only with cases and verbal forms but also with a large vocabulary of words of mixed origin and different inherited rules of changes. PETER GAEFFKE