Mood in Maithili and English

Abstract

The present study, entitled “Mood in Maithili and English” was an attempt to find out the grammatical moods in Maithili and compare the system with that of the English language.The primary source encompassed Maithili native speakers of Kanchanpur VDC of Saptari district. The total sample population of the study included forty nativespeakers of Maithili. The sample population was selected by using snowball random sampling procedure. The sample population was divided in to two groups:literate and illiterate. Each group contained twenty nativespeakers of Maithili language. The data were collected by using two types of research tools: structured interview schedule and questionnaires.Each questionnaire contained forty English sentences with their Nepali translation. The research findings reveal that the Maithili language exhibits five grammatical moods; declarative, interrogative, imperative,probability and optative. This language is not morphologically rich in coding grammatical moods. In general, both the languages indicate moodsystem syntactically rather morphologically and exhibit similar pattern to code major grammatical moods; declarative, interrogative and imperative. The study is organized into four chapters. The first chapter comprises general background, review of the related literature, objectives, and significance of the study. The second chapter deals with the methodology adopted for the study like the sources of data, tools of data collection,process of data collection,sampling procedures and limitations of the study. The third chapter includes the analysis and interpretation of the collected data. The last chapter consists of findings and recommendations of the study. The findings are derived from the analysis and interpretation of the data carried out in chapter three. Recommendations are made on the basis of the findings. In the final section, references and appendix are included.