The Morphology of Saho
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2009-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The general objective of this study is to describe the morphology of Saho
language with particular emphasis on the Irob dialect. This general
objective includes the following specific objectives.
i) Identifying the inflectional morphology of the language
ii) Identifying the derivational morphology of the language
The study describes the inflectional categories of Saho nouns, adjectives,
pronouns and verbs. Nouns are inflected for number and case whereas
gender and definiteness are basically indicated via independent words.
Some pronouns of the language are derivatives and can inflect for
different grammatical categories. Gender in adjectives is marked through
vowel lengthening while number is marked by adding different affixes.
Adjectives always precede the nouns they modify and should agree in
number and gender with the head nouns.
Based on the subject agreement affixes they take, Saho verbs are
classified in to two classes. Verbs in Saho are inflected for the categories
aspect, mood, number and person, whereas tense is marked by the
auxiliary verb -in- . This verb has the same verb conjugation as stems of
class II. The perfectible form -ine indicates the past tense and its
imperfection form -ane indicates the non past tense.
In Noncriminals are basically derived from adjectives, verbs and other
nouns as an abstract, attentive, and infinitive. In addition to nouns verbs
are also derived as causative, passive, reciprocal and auto benefactive by
adding different affixes.
Description
Keywords
morphology