Morphological and syntactic aspects of the Soqotri dialect of Galansiyah
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Date
2009
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 Modern 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 (henceforth BLT) and functional typology. The nonconcatenative Theory, Word and
Paradigm Model (WP) and the Immediate Constituent Model (IC) 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 VAO / AVO.
Description
PhD
Keywords
Humanities , Morphological , Soqotri dialect , Galansiyah