Samatengo Noun Phrase Structure

ABSTRACT

THE study on Samatengo Noun Phrase Structure draws experiences from earlier works on nominal morphology of the nouns in Bantu languages. The morphology of the nouns has been one of the leading factors in classifying Bantu languages and at the same time grouping nouns into gender classes. Studies by Johnston (1919, 1922) and Guthrie (1948, 1967 – 1971, 1970) based on the morphological analysis of the noun in the Bantu languages.

Recent studies like that of Maho (1999), Katamba (Nurse and Philippson, 2003:103 - 120), Kahigi (2005) and Rugemalira (2005, 2006a, 2006b) have gone further looking into concordial patterns of the noun classes with the aim of analyzing the noun class markers in more broad parameters.

This study, however, has made a leap forward by including an analysis of different elements in the entire structure of the noun phrase. Besides looking solely at noun classification and their concords, this study describes the noun phrase structure in terms of noun class dependents – their forms and semantic characteristics, agreement forms, derivation processes and the ordering and co-occurrence of the noun and its dependent elements.

The study reveals that noun pairing in Samatengo has great variability, which can be attested to particular semantic roles. Overlaps come to defeat semantic criteria for noun class analysis. In terms of the derivation process, nouns in Samatengo are productive showing different ways of deriving new nouns.

Included in the analysis is the order of elements – dependents – that co-occur with the noun head in a phrase structure. The study establishes flexibility in terms of some dependents while others seems to have more restricted occurences.