Agar Dinka

Non-segmental phenomena make up only a small part of the morphology of English and related languages. But non-affixal morphology is widespread among the world’s languages. For the Western Nilotic language Dinka, non-affixal morphology is the norm. Despite being almost entirely monosyllabic, Dinka manages to have rich morphology by exploiting alternations in vowel quality, vowel length, voice quality, tone, and final consonants, as demonstrated by Andersen (1993) for the Agar dialect, spoken in Southern Sudan.

Agar Dinka is characterized by a rich set of vowel contrasts. Vowels come with two distinct voice qualities, creaky /v̰/ and breathy /v̤/, and may be long /vvv/, half-long /vv/, or short /v/. Furthermore, vowels can bear a high tone /v̒/, low tone /v̀/, or falling tone /v̂/. Vowel quality plays a role as well. For example, the distinction between lὲ̰ɛt ‘insult (3sg)’ and là̰at ‘insult (1sg)’ or dɔ̰̒ɔk ‘spin (3sg)’ and dà̰ak ‘spin (1sg)’ is one of vowel quality. The seven contrastive vowel qualities of Agar Dinka are given in the following table (Andersen 1993: 4).

Every transitive verb stem in Agar Dinka has 11 inflectionally distinct forms. This is illustrated in (18) for the stem bò̤k ‘to throw at’, preceded in each case by the declarative proclitic particle [à̰-]. While some of the forms contain suffixes (18f–h, j), most morphological distinctions are expressed through non-affixal means. In all, there are seven forms of the verb stem:

The seven forms of the verb stem are schematized in (19) for easy inspection. Andersen (1993: 6) reports that (19a) represents the inflectionally unmarked (i.e., default) case. It occurs with topic (preverbal) subjects and in the second singular. (19b) is used when there is a non-topical (postverbal) subject noun phrase in the clause and differs from the unmarked case in having a lengthened vowel and high tone. The first singular form (19c) has a half-long low-mid back rounded vowel /ɔ/ in place of the short high-mid rounded vowel of (19a). Other forms differ from (19a) in having a lengthened vowel (19d, g), high tone (19e, f), falling tone (19g), and contrasting vowel quality (19f):

From the perspective of a speaker of English or most other European and Asian languages, Agar Dinka morphology is exotic, but it clearly is not from the perspective of speakers of the language. There is no evidence that these seemingly exotic processes are prone to disappear over time or that children of the community experience difficulty in learning to speak the language. We must conclude that non-segmental processes are just as natural as the affixal phenomena so familiar to speakers of English and many other languages and that a theory of morphology should be able to treat them with equal ease. Item-and-arrangement theories can be made to accommodate morphology of the sort that we see in Agar Dinka, but only awkwardly. This is one of the primary arguments that proponents of item-and-process morphology use in support of their general framework, which does not give affixation any special pride of place. A fascinating question is why one language should use a certain type of morphology and another language should not, but we will not attempt to answer it here.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

يعود إلى عام 1915.. منظار بحري يزين خزينة متحف الكفيل للنفائس والمخطوطات

شعبة فاطمة بنت أسد تطلق النسخة الرابعة من دورة (ن والقلم) القرآنية

قسم الشؤون الخدمية ينفذ حملة لغسل محيط العتبة العباسية المقدسة وتنظيفه

قسم الشؤون الفكرية يواصل برامجه التوعوية مع الشباب في ذي قار

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

مؤشرات يومية بسيطة تتفوق على الفحوصات الطبية في التنبؤ بالعمر المتوقع !

كيف تؤثر العناية بالأسنان على صحة الكبد؟

نتائج حديثة مقلقة حول القنب والتبغ

الشوكولاتة وحدها لا تسبب السكري.. عوامل أخرى مؤثرة

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

بسبب الحروب: أزمة الألمنيوم وتأثيرها على صناعة السيارات

انقطاع مؤقت للاتصال مع طاقم "أرتميس 2" خلال الرحلة إلى القمر

واشنطن تضغط على حلفاءها لتعزيز سلاسل توريد الحوسبة الكمومية

لماذا يصر دونالد ترامب على العودة إلى القمر؟

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

The Lexicon

English noun–verb pairs

Non-affixal phenomena and the item-and-process model

Two Approaches to Morphology: Item-and-Arrangement, Item-and-Process

Content words vs. function words

Types of Words

Stress

Non-separability and integrity

Fixed order of elements

Empirical Tests for Wordhood

Grammatical words

Defining words phonologically