A Morphosyntactic Analysis Of The Clause Structure Of The Endangered Mehri Language In Yemen
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Date
2017-06
Authors
Al-Qumair, Saeed Saad Njdan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
This study investigates synchronically the morphological and syntactic features
of the Mehri language that is spoken by Mehri people who originally live in Al-Mahrah
governorate at the eastern part of Yemen. It focuses on the variety of Šḥān territory as
the one which is not influenced by Arabic. Generally, Mehri belongs to the Modern
South Arabian Languages [henceforth, MSAL]. This group descends from Semitic
family that itself is affiliated to a wider group called Afro-Asiatic family. Though Mehri
is considered to be an endangered language due to the influence of Arabic, it has yet
been studied or documented properly. This study proposes a Minimalist analysis with
the objectives to determine the morphosyntactic features of the Mehri lexicon, to explain
the VP shell structures and the types of Mehri verbs, and to examine the complementary
CPs which dominates lower projections. Since the Universal Grammar (UG) changes
linguistics from behavioural to cognitive science making linguistics an integral part of
the study of cognition, this study employs Minimalist Program (MP) in order to describe
the linguistic competence of the Mehri native speakers. The ethnographic qualitative
field design is adopted for the study in which 20 native speakers are selected as
participants. Various data collection instruments are used such as elicitation, participant
observation and oral texts. The process of data collection is based on Bouquiaux and
Thomas (1992) and Bowern (2008). The study reveals that the substantive categories in
Mehri are classified into three morpheme types: templatic morphemes, affixational
morphemes and non-templatic morphemes.
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Keywords
A Morphosyntactic analysis of the clause structure , endangered Mehri language in Yemen