Morphological And Syntactic Aspects Of The Soqotri Dialect Of Galansiyah

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Date
2009-09
Authors
Makhashen, Khaled Awadh Omer
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Abstract
This study describes synchronically the major morphological and syntactic features of the Soqotri Dialect of Galansiyah (henceforth, SDG) in Soqotra Island, Yemen. The SDG is a variety of Soqotri which belongs to the Modem South Arabian Languages (henceforth, MSAL).This group which descends from the south branch of the western Semitic languages includes six pre-Islamic unwritten languages still spoken in South Arabia particularly in Yemen and Oman. Though Soqotri has become an endangered language due to the great influence of Arabic, it has not yet been described or documented properly. This descriptive study concentrates on the SDG which unlike the other Soqotri varieties, still possesses most of its original linguistic features. The study aims at describing the types and functions of the morpheme in the SDG, the way these morphemes combine nonconcatenatively to form stems and the inflectional and derivational operations the stems of its nouns, verbs and adjectives may undergo internally or externally. It also aims at describing the types, structures and functions of the phrase, clause and sentence in this dialect in addition to its basic word orders. An ethnographic qualitative field research design was employed for this study in which 10 native speakers were chosen as informants according to the non- probability judgment sampling. Various data collection instruments were employed such as the different types of elicitation (direct translation, interviews questionnaires, native speaker's judgment, etc.), participant observation and collection of oral texts (oral literature).Theoretically, the study is based on Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory (hencefo~ BLT) and functional typology. The nonconcatenative Theory, Word and Paradigm Model (WP) and the Immediate Constituent Model (Ie) were also used to supplement the BLT. The study reveals that the SDG has three types of morphemes: templatic morphemes, affixional morphemes and non-templatic word-stem morphemes. The templatic morphemes, which are abstract discontinuous morphemes, combine together nonlinearly to form stems. The inflectional and derivational processes of nouns, verbs and adjectives are achieved either externally (linearly) through adding an affixational morpheme to the stem or internally (nonlinearly) through modifying the vowels of that stem and in some cases this nonlinear process involves both vocalic modification and the addition of an affix. The study indicates that this operation which is called root and pattern morphology is widely employed in the SDG. Syntactically, the study shows the structures and functions of the different types of noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases and prepositional phrases in this dialect. The structural and functional description of the clause in this dialect, the SDG, reveals that it has two main clauses and three subordinate clauses. The main clauses are the nominal clause and verbal clause and the subordinate clauses are the complement clause, the relative clause and the adverbial- clause. The study describes the sentence in the SDG structurally as simple, compound, complex or compound complex and it describes it functionally as declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory, optative or imprecative. Finally, the study reveals that the SDG has two basic word orders: VS / SV and V AO / AVO.
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The major morphological and syntactic features of , the Soqotri Dialect of Galansiyah
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