Browsing by Author "Yigezu, Moges"

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    Nuer Phonology: the Role of Syllable Structure
    (Addis Ababa Universiy, 1993-06) Yigezu, Moges; A.Gutt, Dr. Ernst
    This paper deals with the phonology of Nuer. It attempts to give ~brief description of the phonology and examines t he r ole of the syllable 'lk~ structure in light of ",auto segmental approach. Chapter one gives some background information about the p.-e-ople and the ~n~ge, the r eview of literature and the theoretical models employed in the analyses. Chapter two deals with a brief description of t he phonology, describing and a nalyzing the consonant and vowel p h onemes in"A'"-l ight of underspecification theory. The underspecified feature matrices a re given with the r elevant redundancy rules for both consonants and vowels. The description gives special attention to the vowel system, because of its interesting but difficult ...- na ture. There are sixteen vowel phonemes against the twenty consonant phonemes . T he vowels b elong to two types of voice qualities: plain and breathy. It is a distinction based on the acou s tic analyses of the two sets of vowels . Besides, the t onal system is briefly described and three tone levelS-high, mid and low- are recorded. Chapter three discusses the morphophonemic processes and the role t he syllable s tructure plays. From both descriptive and theoretical point s of view, .• syllable structure is found to be an interesting aspect of Nuer phonology. It can control most of the morphophone mic processes of the language and these processes are conditioned both by the principle of licensing and the syllable t emplate of Nuer. The fourth and the last chapter gives the summary and conclusion of the thesis.
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    Word Formation In K+stantfifia
    (AAU, 2000-01) Yehu Gurmu, Alema; G/Tsadik, Abebe (Phd); Yigezu, Moges
    This thesis attempts to investigate and explain the word-formation processes of Kistantiiiia, one of the Ethio-Semitic languages. The issues raised are nominali zation, verbalization, adj ecti vization, reduplication and compounding. These largely represent the non-inflectional aspects of morphology. An overview of Kis tane phonology is included in order to give highlights to the morpho-phonemic processes of the language. The major morpho- phonemic processes are assimilation, insertion and deletion of segments. Under nominali zation, the diffe rent nomina Is are described and their deri vation shown. The two major types of nominals are those deri ved concatenatively such as abstract nominals and those deri ved non-concatcnati vely sucli as action nominals. In verb-formation, the di ffe rent ve rbal patterns are discussed. Roots are the bases for the formati on of mos t verbals, and in some cases, perfec ti ve forms of verbs are taken as bases. Reduplication is discussed under verbali zation, as it is verbal based and res ults in verbal outputs. Adjectivization is also based on roots, stems and words used as inputs. Formally, there are some adj ectivizers that are similar to some Kistantiiiia nOlllinali zers but with different function s. x Compounding in the Kistane language also takes roots, stems or words as bases. Different lexical categories such as nouns, adjectives, verbs etc. come together to form compound adjectives, verbs and nouns. Some deri vations are governed by word-formation rules and others are demonstrated with the help of morphemic-tier hypothesis which adequately explains Semitic morphology in general.