Browsing by Author "Tesfaye, Girum"

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    Ideophones in Sidaama Documentation and Description
    (Addis Ababa Universiy, 2013-05) Tesfaye, Girum; Mezengia, Shimelis
    This study deals with ideophones in Sidaama. The Sidaama ideophones are unique from the other word categories in the language. They are expressive of sound symb'olism in that they manifest systematic relations with meanings. They exhibit features that. are less common in the other word classes of the language. Some ideophones display nasalization expressed via nasalized vowels. Ideophones in Sidaama are expressed in limited morphophonemic patterns. They have their own rules such as vowel harmony and sound alteration. They are commonly disyllabic and exhibit extralong syllables. Furthermore, total reduplication is highly productive in ideophones. Unlike the other open class words in Sidaama, ideophones take little inflectional affixes. However, other open-class words can be derived from them by means of affixation, compounding and reduplication. Ideophones are syntactically associated with the auxiliary verbs / 7ass-/ 'do' and / j-/ 'say' and occur in a focused position in a sentence which is preverbal. Sidaama ideophones have specific, expressive and emphatic meanings. Given aforesaid unique characteristics, Sidaama ideophones seem to constitute their own independent open word class