Morphology of Eža
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Date
2002-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Eža is one of the least studied ‘Gurage Languages’ of the Ethio-Semitic family. This
study aims to provide descriptive account of its morphology. Thus, the inflection and
derivation of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and numerals are considered.
Some compound nouns and adjectives are also identified.
It is shown that nouns are inflected for number, gender, definite article, and different
types of cases. Affixes deriving nominals such as abstract, gerundive, result, group identity,
agent and instrument are identified.
Forms of pronouns and their inflections are discussed. Subject and object agreement
pronominal affixes are shown.
Verbs are grouped based on their radical and stem patterns. It is found that the verbs
are inflected for person, gender, number, aspect, tense, and mood. Affixes and stem patterns
that derive verbs including passive, reflexive, causative, frequentative, reciprocal, reciprocal
causative, frequentative passive, frequentative of the reciprocal, and causative of the
frequentative reciprocal are shown.
Types of adverbs and their derivations are discussed. It is claimed that some time
adverb deriving affixes show past and future time. Adjectives are grouped into seven
semantic fields and four ways of deriving them is shown. It is found that adjectives are not
inflected for number and person but can be inflected for definite article. Numerals that have
simple lexical representation are found to be only twelve. The other numerals of the
language are derived from the simple numeral sets. Finally, summary of the main findings
of the study
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Eža