Browsing by Author "Woldemariam, Hirut (PhD)"

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    Documentation and Grammatical Description of Kole
    (Addis Ababa University, 2016-04) Gonderie, Samuel; Woldemariam, Hirut (PhD)
    The present study deals with Kole language and its purpose is two-fold. The first one is providing a detailed description of the Kole language, while the second one is documenting the language. The documentation is used as the base for the grammatical description ofKole. Kole is an endangered Omotic language spoken in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State in southern Ethiopia. The methods used to collect the data include group discussion, elicitation, audio and video recordings. The study tried to document different genres of traditional folks and to make the grammatical description of Kole by focusing on the language's own features. Kole has twenty seven phonemes and five vowels with their long counterparts. Consonant gemination and vowel lengthening are phonemic in the language. The syllable structure of Kole can be captured by the following general formula: C1V (V) (CO-2), where CO-2 shows the range of coda. In addition to this, Kole is a tone-accent language in which high tone occurs only once persimple word. Kole is an interesting language from morphological perspectives. The overwhelming majority of simple nouns in Kole language are disyllabic. Monosyllabic nouns are not attested. Most polysyllabic nouns that are nouns with three or more syllables are attested to be polymorphemic as well. All nominals (nouns, adjectives and numerals) show terminal (root-final) vowels in their citation form. Besides, the Kole language shows an intricate system of focus marking that affects the morpho-syntactic properties and categorization of a verb. Following the focus marker, other grammatical inflections like person, ~ense, aspect and mood are suffixed to a verb. The language distinguishes between the singular and plural number values. While verbs involve one ofthe mood markers, pronouns and demonstratives necessarily take case suffixes in order to occur as phonological words. Pronouns and demonstratives can also occur as proclitics to other words. An elaborated system of mood and modality is also observed in Kole language.Regarding syntax, the most frequent word order in Kole language is SOY. The word order is not quite rigid. As has been observed from wide variety of SO V languages, Subject-Object inversion and other phenomena frequently lead to the separation of verb from the object noun phrase, which leads inevitably to the question of wheth~r a verb phrase exists in Kole language or whether it is a non-configurational language with the rule S~ NP V. A postpositional phrase in this language is a phrase that contains a postpositional element preceded by a noun phrase or another postpositional phrase complement. Unlike other phrases, the head postposition cannot stand alone as a postpositional phrase; it rather needs an obligatory complement. In Kole, four formallstructurall categories or sentence types are distinguished: these are declarative, interrogative, imperative and optative sentence types. In the description of complex sentence types such as relative clause, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, quotaive clauses, converb, switch reference and co-ordinations are identified with their illustrative examples. The second part of the study deals with the documentation of Ko Ie language. Audio and video data of the language have been documented. The documentation includes tales, legend, interviews and language game. Annotation, transcription, gloss and translation have been done on ELAN software .