Inflectional and Derivational Morphology of Nouns in Some Selected Gurage Languages: A Comparative Approach
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Date
2008-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This thesis attempts to investigate and describe the inflectional and
derivational morphology of nouns in Gurage languages. It compares and
contrasts the morphological properties of nouns in the languages. The
study also provides a brief description of the phonemic inventory of the
languages The Gurage linguistic group comprises several languages. For ease of
manageability, this study deals with three selected languages of the
group, namely Soodo, Muher and Eza.Based on their morphological properties, the study categorizes the
selected languages into two: Soddo in one group and Muher and Eza in
the other. This study also identifies that Soddo is more conservative
preserving the archaic morphological forms, while Muher and Eza appear
to be more innovative.This study also addresses the position of Muher in the group, which is a
controversial issue for various scholars. The position of Muher, that is,
whether it belongs to the Northern Gurage group or to the Western
Gurage group has been a point of controversy. This study confirms that
Muher is closer to the languages of Western Gurage than to those within
the Northern Gurage group.
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Keywords
Inflectional, Derivational