This chapter presented an outline of the various aspects of Chimakonde grammar and it also reviewed previous research studies in Chimakonde. The initial point was to provide the rationale for outlining the descriptive grammar of Chimakonde. It was pointed out that various variables that the current study is investigating require, as a prerequisite, understanding the architecture of the grammar of the language. For example, it was pointed out that the inflectional properties of person, number and person, which this study investigates as one of its objectives, cannot be determined without a recourse to the noun class of the language. The second section of the chapter presented a brief history of the Makonde people and their cultural practice. This was done by acknowledging the fact that language is shaped by time and the people are shaped by the language they speak. Another aspect that was
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discussed in this chapter was the phoneme inventory and tone system of the language. It was significant to outline the sound system because the study makes use of glossing conventions which one cannot do without understanding phonemes. Outlining the tone properties of the language was equally important because the tone in Chimakonde interacts with other areas of the grammar enormously. For example, it was pointed out that very often main clauses and dependent clauses such as relative clauses may look alike, making it impossible to distinguish them formally but only tonally. The word order properties of the syntactic structures were also outlined. It was stated that Chimakonde is a head-initial language for complements in both the nominal and clausal domains follow their heads. However, for stylistic reasons, a possibility was raised that complements can come before nouns in Chimakonde.
Related to the discourse-pragmatic contexts is the interpretation of bare nouns in Chimakonde in regard to definiteness and specificity. It was hinted that a bare noun in Chimakonde can be definite/non-definite and it is the function of discourse which disambiguates the intended interpretation. Affixes that are crucial to deriving nouns from other syntactic calories were also outlined. It was stated that nominal derivation through affixes is a very productive process in Chimakonde. Finally, a review of previous studies on Chimakonde was given. This was done not only to identify aspects studied in Chimakonde but also to identify knowledge gaps that the present study can bridge. The general picture that emerges is that Chimakonde has limited studies in terms of its descriptions of various aspects of the language, particularly syntactic issues. The tone seems to be the main aspect that a few scholars have studied. In the studies reviewed, Jaffu (2010) was the only study on noun phrases. However, no theoretical issues were raised in this study, which is my interest in the current study. Kraal (2005) included sections on nominal modifiers but not on noun phrases. In other words, the morpho-syntactic properties, as well as discourse-pragmatic considerations of a nominal head and its modifiers taken as a unit, were not explored. Kraal (2005) and Jaffu (2010) have both raised the issue of the demonstrative root being omitted or not omitted in some syntactic distributions. However, none of them has provided an account of why the root is omitted or not- omitted in some environments and not in others. This is a further question that this study attempts to explore.
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CHAPTER THREE
PERSPECTIVES FROM PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON NOMINAL MODIFIERS, DP SYNTAX, DEFINITENESS AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The various aspects of the Chimakonde Determiner phrases (DPs) that the current study aims to investigate relate to and are dependent on insights of a comprehensive review of the linguistic literature of the previous studies on these aspects. This chapter, therefore, aims to discuss major issues raised in relevant studies on DPs within the framework of generative syntax. The major issues that this chapter discuss relate to the syntactic representation of nominal modifiers, DPs, definiteness and information structure. The chapter begins with terminology clarification which is discussed in section 3.2. In this section, the definitions of terms that are relevant to this study as encapsulated in the linguistic literature are discussed. These definitions are either rejected or adopted to suit the current study. The chapter proceeds with the review of nominal modifiers. Given the wide range of nominal modifiers, no attempt is made to review all the studies on modifiers available in the linguistic literature. Instead, three modifiers are selected based on their relevance to this study of which the selected studies are Bhat (2004), Cinque (1994), and Vries (2002), to mention a few.
The discussion of the nominal modifiers takes place in section 3.3. Section 3.4 is dedicated to the discussion of DP. This section begins with a brief history of transformational grammar from research on the noun phrase to development concerning the projection DP in generative syntax. Since the conception of the DP hypothesis was propelled by symmetries observed between the clause and the noun phrase, factors supporting such symmetries are reviewed in section 3.5 These factors are of semantic, syntactic and morphological nature. The functional head D which heads DP is associated with various semantic and discourse-pragmatic interpretations such as specificity and definiteness. I will invoke these concepts in this study, in investigating the DP-syntax of Chimakonde. However, these notions are subjected to multiple interpretations in the linguistic literature. It is for this reason that in section 3.9, I discuss the principles of definiteness and specificity proposed by Lyons (1999). The next section discusses the key notions information structure. Like specificity and definiteness, aspects of information structure are central to the current study, bearing in mind that the notion ‘information structure’ is multifaceted. In this section, I, therefore, discuss the theory of information structure as proposed by Lambrecht (1999) and developed by Aboh et al. (2010) and Repp (2010). Two aspects of this theory are discussed, namely his definition of information structure and pragmatic relations of topic and focus. However, it is the notion of focus that is relevant to this study. The last section in 3.12 gives a summary of all the various issues discussed in this chapter in brief.
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