Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics

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Browsing Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics by Subject "Chiyao"

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    Grammatical Relations in Chiyao
    (Journal of The Korean Association of African Studies, 2014-08) Taji, Julius, J.
    This paper investigates how subjects, objects, and locative expressions are marked in Chiyao. The findings show that subject marking in Chiyao is always obligatory, and that it is affected by the topicality and position of the subject noun phrase in a sentence. As for objects, it is shown that object marking is determined by a combination of both semantic and morphological factors. It is revealed that animate objects are obligatorily marked, inanimate objects are optionally marked on verbs with more than one syllable, but they are not marked on monosyllabic verbs. With regard to locative expressions, the paper shows that Chiyao expresses location by marking either the verb (by using the applicative suffix) or the locative argument (by using the locative prefix) or by marking both the verb and the locative argument. Chiyao can also show location by double affixation, which involves attaching a locative prefix and a locative suffix to a noun.
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    Subject-Verb Agreement in Chiyao Conjoined Noun Phrases
    (Inter Press of Tanzania Ltd, 2014) Taji, Julius J.; Mreta, Abel Y.
    This paper discusses different strategies for establishing concord with conjoined noun phrases in Chiyao (P.21), a cross-border Bantu language spoken by about three million people scattered in five countries of eastern and southern Africa. The findings reveal that various options are available in Chiyao for showing concord in conjoined noun phrases (NPs*). These include the use of default agreement markers a- (class 2) for human nouns, and i- (class 8) for non-human nouns; the use of an agreement marker of the noun closest to the verb, as a default strategy for locative and post-verbal conjoined noun phrases; taking an agreement marker from a human noun in cases where the conjunct involves a human and a non-human noun; and opting for a compound sentence, thus avoiding the conjoined construction. The paper is organized into six sections. The first section introduces the problem and provides background information to the language and its speakers. The second section presents the methodological issues of the study. The third section discusses subject-verb agreement strategies in Chiyao. The fourth section presents a brief review of previous works on conjoined noun phrases in Bantu. The fifth section discusses different strategies for establishing concord with conjoined noun phrases in Chiyao, and the last section provides a conclusion.