Phonology, Morphology and Syntax of Ganta

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Date

2017-06

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

This project was concerned with the phonology, morphology and syntax of endangered language, Ganta. Thus, the investigation was aimed at documentation and description of the distributional properties of sound systems, inflectional and derivational strategies of words, and also the order of morphological elements and their relationships in a sentence. To this end, the total documentation part of the project comprised one hour and two minute video text, for which ELAN software was used to annotate linguistic features. The description and distribution of phonological shapes were expressed by consonant and vowel phonemes in which an exceptional Omotic language sequence of consonant-consonant is observed. Phonological and morphophonological processes of the language were discussed in detail. Next to the sound systems, word inflections and derivations were analysed on nouns, verbs and adjectives. Here, Ganta nouns are inflected for number, gender, definiteness and case. Other than inflectional processes, morphological affixes are used to derive nouns into other forms of nouns. Like nouns, verbs also express inflection, by which tense, aspect, mode/modality and mood formations are expressed in Ganta. The issue of negation and subject agreement markings were discussed after inflection strategies of verbs. The processes of verb derivations were described by causative, passive, reciprocal, iterative, incho-ative and infinitive marking affixes. The semantic classification of adjectives were treated before sections of adjective inflection and derivation. Morphology of adverbs that are used to express place, direction, time, manner and frequency were described before interjection and ideophone sections. The syntactic structures, in which noun, verb, and postpositional phrases of Ganta are firstly treated before clause structures. Word order, focus, copula and predicative morphology of the language are described under section of clause structures. Next to this section, complex sentence structures including complement, adverbial clause, relative clause and coordination were also presented in the last section, next to the summary and conclusion of the project.

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morphology and syntax of endangered language

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