A Hindi Reference Grammar.

• Author: Shapiro, Michael C.
• Position: Reviews of Books

A Hindi Reference Grammar. By STELLA SANDHAL. Louvain: PEETERS, 2000. Pp. x + 156. FB 800.

The book under review is intended to be a "reference grammar of the Modern Hindi language written and spoken by educated speakers and taught in Hindi schools in the Hindispeaking areas of India, i.e., Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar" (p. v). It is clear that the primary audience for the volume consists of language students, for whom the book would serve as a supplement to other pedagogical materials. Indeed, Sandahl states that earlier versions of the book have been used since 1977 in classroom situations in Europe and Canada. Sandahl seeks to describe the structure of standard Hindi primarily to enhance the ability of students of the language "to understand and translate correctly complex texts, both fiction and non-fiction" (p. v). It would not, I believe, be unfair to state that Sandahl intends this book to serve as a means for students to deal with the grammatical complexities of written texts in the normative register of Hindi. In addition, in order to enable the read er to parse Hindi texts correctly, she introduces him to a system of grammatical interpretation that she refers to by the term "syntagmatical analysis."

In terms of structure, the core of the book is divided into fourteen chapters, treating script and pronunciation, nouns, postpositions, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronominal adjectives and adverbs, numerals, verbs, the suffix -vala, the suffix -sa, particles, conjunctions, and syntax respectively. All but two of the chapters are divided into sections treating specific topics (e.g., the chapter on numbers contains sections entitled "general remark," "cardinals." "ordinals," and "fractions"), which in turn are also subdivided into small, generally paragraph-length treatments of areas of grammar. The sections and subsections of the fourteen chapters are numbered serially, with the book as a whole comprising a total of 494 sections. Most of these deal with small points of grammar, although one, [section]420, is a rather lengthy list, arranged alphabetically, of verbs that can be used as one or another type of verbal auxiliary. Hindi forms and example sentences are written in Devanagari. Romanization is not used, exce pt in the chapter on script and pronunciation, where it (and occasionally IPA) is used along with Devanagari. No information is provided about the sources of example Sentences and...