Documentation and Grammatical Description of Gofa
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Date
2015-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This thesis gives a descriptive account of The Grammar of Gofa, one of a little described
Omotic language spoken in South-west Ethiopia. It is mainly discussed within the
framwork of Basic Language Theory (BLT) which was introduced by Dixon (1997) and
Dryer (2006). The segmental phonology of the language shows that the language has about
30 consonants and 5 vowel phonemes.
The tone in the language has both grammatical and morphological or lexical functions. The
morphological tone is used to derive a few nominals from the major word classes: nouns,
adjectives, verbs as well as adverbs. Besides, we derive as much new class maintaining and
class changing nominals by means of derivational bound morphemes and compounding in
addition to lexical tone. Different morphological rules such as segment insertion, dropping
/deletion, suppletion and conversion among others interact with the inflectional as well as
the derivational morphology of the language.
As the inflectional morphology of the language shows, Gofa is a nominative -accusative
language for the subject of the intransitive verb and the agent of the transitive verb assign
the nominative case whereas the direct object assigns the accusative case that expresses the
argument position the noun occupies in a sentence. In rare cases, indefinite nouns that are
vowel final -e and -o observed do not assign the accusative case for the language partially
employs differential case system. The case system of the language co-marks defniteness
and gender when the terminal vowels of the different classes of nominals inteact.
Masculine is observed the default gender of many animate and inanimate nouns. Very
limited animate nouns are expressed in biological gender distinguishing lexicons and
morphemes. Gofa allows a flexible word order between the indirect and direct object
arguments. The head nouns occupy the right side of the noun phrase where they are
modfied /defined by the specifiers, the complements as well as the relative clauses.
We attested that Gofa employs three relative clauses forming strategies: a gapping with the
invariant -a that define the head noun, place maintaining enclitic pronominal suffixed to the
invariant relative suffix and gender and number expressing morphemes attached onto the
enclitic pronominals.
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descriptive account of The Grammar of Gofa,, little described Omotic language spoken in South-west Ethiopia