1. INTRODUCTION
grammars. Comparative and historical grammars are mostly
concerned with presenting the diachronic description of the
grammatical features at different linguistic levels, especially
phonology and morphology. They are useful for historical linguists
and those interested in the comparative linguistics of Indo-Aryan
languages.
Modern linguistic grammars in Hindi have been written with various
objectives. Most of the modern linguistic grammars deal with some
aspects of syntax at length and tend to apply the western theoretical
models and raise theoretical issues. They are useful for linguists
interested in theoretical discussions and are of little use to the
language learners and teachers of Hindi or to general readers. It is
important to mention a few grammars here.
Aryendra Sharma (1958) prepared first detailed descriptive grammar
of modern Hindi in English. It has been revised and printed several
times. Though written in a traditional format it presents a good
description of Hindi. Different linguistic aspects of Hindi have been
described in various dissertations and independent grammatical
studies lately. I will specially mention three recent works: Mountaut
(2005), Kachru (2006), and Agnihotri (2007) written with different
objectives.
Moutaut (2005) provides a functional description of Hindi from a
typological perspective. She provides a brief phonological outline of
standard Hindi, its morphological analysis, an analysis of simple
clauses and complex sentences. The final section provides
representative features of standard Hindi, its various dialects with
special reference to other neighboring Indo-Aryan languages. She
presents review of the earlier works on the subject and uses
examples from various written texts. It is a first linguistic grammar
of Hindi written from a typological point of view and is useful for
linguists working in the area of linguistic typology with special
reference to Indo-Aryan languages.
Kachru (2006) describes the structure of modern Hindi keeping in
view primarily the sociolinguistic context of language use. She
provides description of sounds, devices of word formation, rules of
phrases, and sentence constructions and conventions and practices of
language use in spoken and written texts keeping in view recent
linguistic theories. She also deals with the information and