A morphosyntactic analysis of mood in dholuo; The minimalist

Abstract

This study is a morphosyntactic analysis of mood in Dholuo. It also examines the content of the VP and role of tone in Dholuo mood constructions. The study sets out to find out how Dholuo mood is expressed, the modal structure and how it is affected by feature checking under Chomsky's minimalist program (1995). Chapter one discusses the background to the language of the study, states the problem and objectives of the study, outlines the hypotheses, rationale and the theoretical framework of the minimalist program, and discusses the literature review and methodology. Chapter two discusses the categories of Dholuo mood and possible word formation processes of inflection and derivation realized on the auxiliary. Chapter three discusses the mood morpho logy to determine its morpho syntactic functions in the Minimalist program. The modal auxiliary, which precedes the main verb in a construction, is inserted into its base position in the VP. The inflectional nodes are for feature checking. Chomsky (1993) states that morphology plays an important role in the new theory. The operations in the computational system are driven by morphological and lexical necessity. The amount of movement that takes place in the structure building depends on how rich or weak the morphology of a language is. The study concludes that this theory accounts for the features present in the Dholuo mood system with modifications to cater for the feature checking of Dholuo mood in terms of creation of a head for mood and aspectual tone for the auxiliary that derives from a noun, or tonal distinction where an auxiliary is used together with the verb from which it derives. This is in line with the idea that the minimalist program is based on feature checking and structure building; both processes are morphologically or lexically driven. The features build the structure. Morphemes are moved out of the lexicon to build the structure.