Morphology and Verb Construction Types of Kistaniniya

Abstract

The thesis deals with the morphology and verb construction types of Kistaniniya which is a member of the south Ethio-Semitic sub-group. In Ethnologue it is referred to as Soddo. It is a morphologically complex SOV language.

This thesis is organized into an introducing chapter and then in two parts. The first chapter provides general introduction to the Kistane people, the phonology and syllable structure of Kistaniniya. Part I, which contains Chapter 2 to Chapter 5, is devoted to describing the morphology of the language. Chapter 2 describes the morphology of nouns and pronouns. Nouns are morphologically inflected for number, gender, definiteness and case. New nouns can be formed by noun formation, noun derivation and compounding. Noun formation is a process of specifying a consonantal root with vowels to form a noun. On the other hand noun derivation uses derivational affixes attached to noun stems and/or words belonging to other lexical categories to derive new nouns. Chapter 3 examines the morphology of adjectives. It is shown that most of the members of the category adjectives are the result of adjective formation as opposed to derivation. Adjectives inflect for the grammatical features number, case and definiteness. Chapter 4 addresses the morphology of adpositions. The discussion covers prepositions, postpositions and circumposition. The prepositions comprise a closed class of five morphemes. Morphologically, postpositions can be simple or complex, and they are frequently used together with prepositions. All circumpositions have the locative morphemes tə-‘to’ and bə- ‘from’ as their part that precedes the nominal complement, and the second part that follows the nominal complement includes a list of words with nominal or verbal origin. Chapter 5 has 11 sections that address verb morphology. In addition to introductory information about the nature of Kistaniniya verbs provided in the introduction section of the chapter, types of verbs, verb formation and derivations, agreement marking, tense, aspect and aktionsarts, verbal negation, relativization, impersonal verbs, copulas and converbs are the major issues examined in the chapter.

Part II consists of Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 gives a detailed description of how the annotation and enumeration system Construction Labelling works. Chapter 7 examines Kistaniniya verb constructions using this system, and categorizes the construction according to their syntactic and semantic features. Finally, Chapter 8 summarizes the discussion and recapitulates the major findings.