A morphosyntactic analysis of dholuo verbal system

Abstract

This study basically analyses Dholuo verbal movement for feature checking under Chomsky's Minimalist Program (1995), Chomsky and Lasnik (1993) argue that verbs are given their inflectional properties (and forms) in the lexicon: thus an already inflected verb is inserted into its base position in the VP and does not have to :110H' anywhere to become inflected, The inflectional nodes. instead of adding inflections to bare verbs. are merely meant for feature checking to ensure that the inserted verb is syntactically correct, The analysis of verb movement is captured in chapter four. which is the main section of the study, Chapter one among other things. highlights the theoretical assumptions of the Minimalist Program. together with its philosophical development Chapter two examines all the possible inflections and derivation-, realized on Dholuo verb, Chapter three looks at the Syntactic function of tone, The study concludes that Minimalist Program being feature driven. can account for all the features realized on Dholuo verbal system However, the basic sentence structure of the MP has to be changed in order to complete the necessary feature checking for the Dholuo verb.