The Case System of Eastern Indo-aryan Languages: A Typological Overview

This book presents a typological overview of the case system of Eastern Indo-Aryan (EIA) languages. It utilizes a cognitive framework to analyse and compare the case markers of seven EIA languages: Angika, Asamiya, Bhojpuri, Bangla, Magahi, Maithili and Odia. The book introduces semantic maps, which have hitherto not been used for Indian languages, to plot the scope of different case markers and facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of these languages. It also offers a detailed questionnaire specially designed for fieldwork and data collection which will be extremely useful to researchers involved in the study of case.

A unique look into the linguistic traditions of South Asia, the book will be indispensable to academicians, researchers, and students of language studies, linguistics, literature, cognitive science, psychology, language technologies and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for linguists, typologists, grammarians and those interested in the study of Indian languages.

Bornini Lahiri is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. She has a PhD in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She has previously worked as a resource person with Scheme for Protection and Preservation of Endangered Languages, hosted by the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysuru. She was a research assistant for Study and Research of Indigenous and Endangered Languages of India, hosted by Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She has also collaborated on projects studying aggression and hate speech including an ongoing project on studying communal and misogynistic aggression, sponsored by Facebook Research. She has worked extensively on typological and morpho-syntactic properties of several lesser-known, low-resourced, under-researched languages including Toto, Mahali, Dhimal, Magahi and Angika. Her publications include Bangla-Kurmali-English-Hindi Dictionary (forthcoming), Effect of Bangla on Koda Verbs (2020), Kurmali: A Language of undivided Bihar (2019), Presence of Minor languages of West Bengal in Social Media (2018), and A Typological Study of Local Cases in EIA Languages (2013), among others.