Browsing by Author "Alemayehu, Hawine"

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    The Structures of Nominal Clauses in Afan Oromo A Minimalist Approach
    (Addis Ababa University, 2007-07) Alemayehu, Hawine; Yimam, Baye (Professor)
    This thesis explores the structure of nominal clauses in Afan Oromo within the framework of Chomsky’s (1993, 1995) Minimalist Program. In particular, it focuses on two types of nominal clauses: akka clause, which is finite and f -clause, which is non-finite. Attempt is made to identify the functional and lexical categories, the possible movements that drive nominal clause structures and the hierarchical order of functional and lexical projections in the structures. In akka clause, there are six functional projections – CP, TP, AspP, NegP, AgrSP and AgrOP. In xi f -clause, on the other hand, there are CP, TP, NegP, AgrSP and AgrOP. With regard to distribution, akka clause is limited to the position of complement while f -clause can occur in all argument positions. Since the language marks nominative case morphologically, the nominal head of f -clause displays the nominative case suffix /-n/. Concerning case checking, both AgrS and Asp can check nominative case and the possible checking domain for accusative case is the light verb and light noun. It is also shown that nominal clauses have SOV word order where the object may be preposed for purpose of focus. Finally, the syntactic representations of nominal clauses have been discussed. The hierarchy in akka clauses is [DP [ CP [ AgrSP [ TP [AspP [ NegP [AgrOP [ vP [VP ]]]]]]]] while in f -clauses the order is [ DP [CP [ AgrSP [ TP [ NegP [AgrOP [ nP [ NP ]]]]]]]].