Hindi: An Essential Grammar is a practical reference guide to the core structures and features of modern Hindi. Assuming no prior knowledge of Hindi grammar, this book avoids jargon and overly technical language as it takes the student through the complexities of Hindi grammar in short, readable sections.
Suitable for either independent study or for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult education classes, key features include:
- Full examples throughout in both Devanagari and Roman script with a gloss in English
- Glossary of technical terms and detailed subject index
- Cross referencing between sections
- Authentic material provided in the appendix demonstrating grammar usage
Hindi: An Essential Grammar will help students, in both formal and non-formal education and of all levels to read, speak and write the language with greater confidence and accuracy.
The revised edition rectifies the printing errors inadvertently made in the first edition; it also further clarifies several other issues including Hindi word order flexibility, compound nouns, ergativity, pronominal usage and polite communication.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Symbols
Abbreviations
Part 1: Hindi and its sentence types
1. Hindi: a brief introduction
2. Hindi sentence structure
3. Negatives
4. Questions
5. Imperatives and politeness
6. Exclamations
Part 2: Words: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs
7. Nouns
8. More about Nouns
9. Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs
10. Verbs
11. More about Verbs
12. Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs
13. Adjectives
14. Adverbs
Part 3: More about Words
15.Reduplication
16. Compounds
17. Causatives
Part 4: Invariant Words
18. Personal Pronouns
19. Other Pronouns
20. Postpositions
21. Emphatic Particles
22.Other Invariant words
Part 5: More about Hindi sentences
23. Habitual Aspect
24. The Progressive Aspect
25. Passive
26. The subjunctive and Future
27. The Ergative Pattern
28. Possession
29. Experiencer Subject
30. Verb caahiye
31. Compound Verbs
Part 6: Compound and complex sentences
32. Coordination and Subordination
33. Complex Sentences
34. Relative Clauses
35. Infinitives and Participles
Part 7: Sounds and script
36. Hindi Sounds and writing system: vowels.
37. Consonantal Sounds
38. Nasals and Nasalisation
39. Syllabic Structure.
Appendix: Grammar in Context.
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Rama Kant Agnihotri retired as Professor and Head, Dept of Linguistics, University of Delhi. He received his D. Phil from the University of York (UK). He has lectured extensively in universities across the world and his previous publications among others include Second Language Acquisition: Socio-cultural and Linguistic Aspects of English in India (edited with A.L. Khanna, 1994), Hindi Morphology: A Word-based Description (with Rajendra Singh, 1997), Noam Chomsky: The Architecture of Language (edited with N. Mukherjee and B. N. Patnaik, 2001) and Being and Becoming Multilingual: Some Narratives (edited with Rajesh Sachdeva, 2022). He is currently Professor Emeritus at Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur.
"The most appealing aspect of Agnihotri’s grammar is its clear conception of its own objectives and functions. For speakers of Hindi, it is an exposition of the systematicity and rule-governed nature of their language; for learners of Hindi, it is an instrument to further the learning of the language. In its jargon-free description of the patterns of Hindi grammar, the volume doubles up as an introduction to modern grammatical analysis for anyone trying their hand at grammar construction. In doing so, it produces an analytical learner/speaker who is not merely a user of language, but also its student." (Kidwai 2007: 149)
"Agnihotri’s examples quite naturally draw on as wide a range of lexical resources and contexts that an average Hindi speaker would be expected to have access to. The accompanying observations on the conditions of use of the examples, and in the Appendix on Grammar in Context, is also particularly worthy of commendation, as they not only relieve the work of the usual accusations of prescriptivism that grammars typically attract, they also reveal to the reader how grammatical analysis enriches our understanding of the social and the symbolic." (Kidwai 2007: 150)
Prof Ayesha Kidwai, Professor of Linguistics at the Centre for Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
