The Morphological Trade-Off: Honorific Expansion and the Loss of Number Agreement in Bhojpuri

This paper examines the typological shift in Eastern Indo-Aryan verbal morphology, focusing on the inverse relationship between number agreement and honorificity in Bhojpuri. While Old Indo-Aryan and modern Western Hindi maintain robust verbal number agreement, Eastern varieties have neutralised this feature entirely. Concurrently, Bhojpuri has developed a highly stratified system of verbal honorifics, encoding up to four levels of social distance and status (intimate, non-honorific, honorific, and high-honorific) directly onto the finite verb. Utilising syntactic data from the Saran-dialect region of Western Bihar, this study argues that the loss of number agreement represents a morphological trade-off rather than simple structural decay. The rigid encoding of sociolinguistic hierarchy demanded extensive structural space within the inflectional paradigm. To prevent extreme morphological congestion on the verb stem, the grammatical burden of number was offloaded onto the noun phrase via periphrasis. By mapping the syntactic architecture of Bhojpuri agreement phenomena, this paper demonstrates that the expansion of honorificity actively catalysed the expulsion of number agreement from the verb, highlighting a direct correlation between sociolinguistic pressures and diachronic syntactic restructuring.