Maithili Morphosyntax: A Typological Perspective

This paper provides a typological account of Maithili morphosyntax, an Indo-Aryan language of the South Asian linguistic area. It examines verb morphology, case marking, grammatical relations, valence-changing processes, grammaticalization, gender, alignment, constituent order, head-finality, pre-nominal modification, interrogatives, and subject-to-subject raising. Maithili is a head-final, postpositional SOV language with predominantly nominative accusative alignment, though word order is flexible and shaped by discourse and information structure. Its verbal agreement system is exceptionally complex, cross-referencing up to three participants, including non-arguments, and encoding honorability rather than number. Number and gender are only weakly grammaticalized, and, unlike Hindi and Nepali, the language lacks ergative case. Non-nominative subjects, null arguments, complex predicates, and subject-to-subject rising further characterize its grammar. The study shows how Maithili combines areal South Asian features with properties unusual within Indo-Aryan.