Documentation and Grammatical Description ofTapo
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2017-06
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This thesis concerns the documentation and description of the grammar of Tapo. Thespeaker call their language l' ap:> (Tapo). Tapo i spoken in Ethiopia and outh Sudan
and is widely known in the literature as Upuuo. The sub-family it belongs to is Koman
(Coman).
The textual data used for documentation has been collected with the aim of building a
corpus of the language. Different tasks of the community from daily activities to
folktales and personal and community history narrations are recorded and archived.
The description of Tapo focuses on phonology, morphology and syntax of the language.
The phonology part has primarily focused on the segmental phonology. Tapo has a total
of 27 consonant phonemes articulated at bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and
glottal places of articulations. All consonants occur in word initial position. Only wordmedial
consonant clusters are allowed in Tapo. These clusters consist of a nasal or a
lateral consonant that always assimilated in place of articulation to the following
consonant, except to dentals. Tapo has a seven-vowel system with ATR distinctions on
the high vowels [+ATR] li,uJ and [-ATR] II, u/.
Tapo's nominal system has scant noun nominal categorization. The language
differentiates between masculine, feminine and neutral singulatives and plurals in nouns.
Tapo has an agglutinative type of verbal system.!t is described based on pre and poststem
saffixation. Tapo's pre-stem contains bound subject pronouns, conditional, and
tense markers. On the other hand, post-stem suffixation incorporates benefactive, mood,
directionals and bound object pronouns.
The basic word order of Tapo is Agent-Verb-Object in transitive and ubject-Verb in
intransitive verbs. Constituents are marked based on hierarchy. Object marking is based
on syntactical hierarchy of entities belonging to human, animal and inanimate. The most
dominant hierarchy being human entities, as a beneficiary mostly placed following the
verb, followed by animates and lastly inanimate entities that would take secondary
object position.
Description
Keywords
Philology