The Syntax of Dholuo Anaphors and Case Assignment

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.