Reported Speech in English and Maithili

Abstract

The research work entitled 'The Reported Speech in English and Maithili', which is a comparative study, is an endeavour to identity the process of transforming the direct speech into the reported speech in the Maithili language, to compare and contrast the processes of transforming the direct speech into the reported speech in the Maithili language with those in English. There were 50 native speakers of the Maithili language as respondents for collecting the authentic data. They were selected from two campuses of Janakpur dham. The campuses were selected non-randomly by using judgemental sampling procedure and the native speakers who were the students of Bachelor's degree were selected systematically by using simple random sampling procedure. The researcher used questionnaire as a tool to collect the data. For English data, he consulted secondary sources such as previous theses, books, etc related to this very research work. Similarly, for Maithili, data along with the collected data from the native speakers, as being a native speaker of Maithili language, the researcher used his intuition as well. The findings of the study show that the same subordinative conjunctions; je, se, and blu, are used to delete the inverted commas from all types of sentences, except from the imperative sentences because no any conjunction is used to perform this task in them, while transforming the direct speech into the reported speech in the Maithili language. Likewise, if there is the first person pronoun in the direct speech in the imperative sentences, then those pronouns are not changed in the Maithili language as that are changed in English. The research is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the introduction to the research topic, general background, the Maithili language and its speaker and boundaries and the English language and its significance in Nepal. In the same way, this chapter also throws light on grammar and its importance, reported speech, literature review, objectives and significance of the study. The second chapter includes methodology which consists of sources of data, sample population and sampling procedure, tool for data collection, process of data collection and limitations of the study. The third chapter deals with analysis, interpretation and presentation of data. The data have been analysed and interpreted comparatively. Findings and recommendations have been mentioned in the fourth chapter.