Browsing by Author "Gelaneh, Mellese"

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    Documentation and Grammatical Description ofTapo
    (Addis Ababa University, 2017-06) Gelaneh, Mellese; Yigezu, Moges (PhD)
    This thesis concerns the documentation and description of the grammar of Tapo. Thespeaker call their language l' ap:> (Tapo). Tapo i spoken in Ethiopia and outh Sudan and is widely known in the literature as Upuuo. The sub-family it belongs to is Koman (Coman). The textual data used for documentation has been collected with the aim of building a corpus of the language. Different tasks of the community from daily activities to folktales and personal and community history narrations are recorded and archived. The description of Tapo focuses on phonology, morphology and syntax of the language. The phonology part has primarily focused on the segmental phonology. Tapo has a total of 27 consonant phonemes articulated at bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal places of articulations. All consonants occur in word initial position. Only wordmedial consonant clusters are allowed in Tapo. These clusters consist of a nasal or a lateral consonant that always assimilated in place of articulation to the following consonant, except to dentals. Tapo has a seven-vowel system with ATR distinctions on the high vowels [+ATR] li,uJ and [-ATR] II, u/. Tapo's nominal system has scant noun nominal categorization. The language differentiates between masculine, feminine and neutral singulatives and plurals in nouns. Tapo has an agglutinative type of verbal system.!t is described based on pre and poststem saffixation. Tapo's pre-stem contains bound subject pronouns, conditional, and tense markers. On the other hand, post-stem suffixation incorporates benefactive, mood, directionals and bound object pronouns. The basic word order of Tapo is Agent-Verb-Object in transitive and ubject-Verb in intransitive verbs. Constituents are marked based on hierarchy. Object marking is based on syntactical hierarchy of entities belonging to human, animal and inanimate. The most dominant hierarchy being human entities, as a beneficiary mostly placed following the verb, followed by animates and lastly inanimate entities that would take secondary object position.