The Syntax of Dholuo Anaphors and Case Assignment
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Date
2021-04
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS)
Abstract
Anaphors which include the reflexive and reciprocal
manifest differently in languages all over the world. As referent
items, they occur as morphological, syntactic or lexical. In this
paper, a different focus is taken by assignment of case to
determine grammaticality of sentences that contain anaphors.
Data was drawn from native speaker intuition and secondary
data from scholars. The data was subjected to validation by
being verified by six adult native speakers. Different types of
anaphors collected were analyzed using descriptive and
qualitative research designs. Case Theory, a module of
Government and Binding Theory was used as the tool for
analysis. The analyses report that Dholuo language exhibit both
lexical and non-lexical words as anaphors which occupy object
position. The non-lexical anaphor –r ‘self’ or ‘each other’, does
not occur in isolation; it is attached to the verb and followed by a
personal pronoun. It is also established that Dholuo anaphor is
assigned morphological accusative case by the verb, the
antecedent is assigned abstract nominative case by INFL(ection);
while the preposition assigns oblique case to its object to satisfy
the case filter principle. However, Exceptional Case marking
(ECM) occurred where the anaphor in an infinitival IP was
exceptionally assigned accusative case by the verb from the
matrix. But, where the Complementizer Phrase (CP) and
Prepositional Phrase (PP) occurred, ECM does not apply since
they are barriers to government. Conversely, Case Theory could
not account for assignment of case to an extra anaphor in the
sentence like wuon ‘self’ in Dholuo that occurred with the
anaphor –r ‘self’ ‘each other. Therefore, there is need for a
linguistic theory that captures the assignment of case to two
anaphors that occur in constructions.
Description
Keywords
anaphors, antecedent, case, case filter, grammaticality