Documentation and Grammatical Description of Gofa
| dc.contributor.advisor | SiSilY, Dinyam(PhD) | |
| dc.contributor.author | Cheru, Sellassie | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-02-07T15:15:06Z | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-11-08T04:33:38Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-02-07T15:15:06Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-11-08T04:33:38Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2015-06 | |
| dc.description.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. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/16307 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Addis Ababa University | en_US |
| dc.subject | descriptive account of The Grammar of Gofa, | en_US |
| dc.subject | little described Omotic language spoken in South-west Ethiopia | en_US |
| dc.title | Documentation and Grammatical Description of Gofa | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |