A morpho-syntactic analysis of agreement in Gikuyu in the minimalist program

Abstract

The main concern of this study was to analyze agreement in Glkuyu nouns and verbs. The noun and verb movements were analyzed for feature checking under the Minimalist Program Chapter one mainly introduces the tenets and looks at its philosophical background among other things.

The main concern of this study was to analyze agreement in Gikuyu nouns and verbs. The noun and verb movements were analyzed for feature checking under the Minimalist Program (MP), Chomsky (1993, 1995). Chapter one mainly introduces the tenents of the MP and looks at its philosophical background among other things. Chapter two analyzes Gikuyu noun classes and agreement marking between the Head Noun (HN) and its modifiers. UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI EAST AFRICANA COLLECTION Chapter three examines agreement markers in the Gikuyu verb form. The analysis of the verb and noun movement is done in chapter four, which is the core of the study. Here we see that in the Minimalist Program verbs and nouns are given their inflectional properties in the lexicon. The inflectional nodes do not just add inflections to bare verbs and nouns, instead they are meant for feature checking to ensure that the inserted verb or noun is syntactically correct. Chapter five presents the conclusion that the Minimalist Program is adequate to describe agreement features found in the Gikuyu Noun Phrase construction, verb form and sentences.