Seth Cable Field Methods Fall 2010 Ling 404 1 Short Summary of What We’ve Learned About Kikuyu In these notes, I summarize some of the main features of the Kikuyu language that we’ve learned about thus far in class. Along the way I note some questions for future research, either together as a class or individually in your own interviews and final projects. 1. Verbal Morphology Like all Bantu languages, Kikuyu is ‘highly inflected’. Indeed, as we’ve seen, a single word or Kikuyu can correspond to an entire sentence of English (e.g. I was dancing). A technical term that linguistics sometimes use for such languages is ‘polysynthetic,’ a term that really means nothing more than ‘a language with really big verbs that can stand for a whole sentence.’ Since there’s so much verbal morphology in Kikuyu, we spent most of the first month exploring some of it. As we saw, decoding the verbal morphology of a language like Kikuyu is far from a simple task, and it’s pretty clear that there’s still a whole lot we don’t understand. Here, though, is a summary of what (we think) we do understand. First, the inflected forms that we’ve systematically studied thus far are composed of the following morphemes, arranged in the following orders. (1) Morphological Template for Kikuyu Verb (ni)! - Subject Agreement - Tense Prefix - ROOT - Aspect Suffix ndi! (1sg) a (past) ire (perfective) u! (2sg) ra (pres. imp.) aga (imperfective) a (3sg) ga (future) tu! (1pl) mu! (2pl) ma (3pl) a (u!cio class) ri! (ri!u class) ki! (ki! class) y (i!yo class) Many of the glosses appearing in the chart above are just rough ‘first guesses’ regarding the function of the prefixes in question. That is, although it’s clear what the meaning of each subject agreement prefix is, it’s less clear what the meaning of the ‘tense prefix’ prefix a- is, or the meaning of the suffix –aga. All we know is that they appear in the following inflectional ‘strings’.Seth Cable Field Methods Fall 2010 Ling 404 2 (2) Tense and Aspect Forms that We’ve Seen Thus Far a. Past Perfective (ni)! - Subj. Agr. - a – ROOT - ire Example ni!ndateng’erire. ni ! - ndi! - a - teng’era - ire. I ran. b. Present Imperfective (ni)! - Subj. Agr. - ra – ROOT Example ni!ndi!rateng’era. ni ! - ndi! - ra - teng’era. I ran. c. Past Imperfective: (ni)! - Subj. Agr. - a – ROOT - aga Example ni!ndathiaga. ni ! - ndi! - a - thie - aga I went. d. Future: (ni)! - Subj. Agr. - ga – ROOT Example ni!ngateng’era ni ! - ndi! - ga –teng’era I will run. (3) A Note Regarding the Prefix Ni! We’ve seen that the prefix ni! which often begins these verbal forms has a rather ‘mysterious’ function. Here are some pointers that Nancy has given us thus far: a. You absolutely need to include ni! if the only word in the sentence is the verb itself. However, if there are other words in the sentence, ni! is optional. b. If you have two sentence conjoined (or juxtaposed together), you absolutely cannot put ni! on the second sentence (though it’s optional on the first; see (a) above). Full Disclosure: Prefixes like ni! exist in some other Bantu languages as well, and what their actual function is in these languages remains a deep mystery.Seth Cable Field Methods Fall 2010 Ling 404 3 (4) A Puzzle for Future Investigation On 9/29/2010, Nancy gave us the following verbal forms, which hint at a much more complex tense system than we’ve imagined thus far. a. nĩngũthomaga rũcinĩ I was reading this morning b. nĩngũthoma ũmũthĩ I will read today. c. Observations (i) Both these forms seem to contain the prefix gu!. Both of them make reference to times during the present day. (And Nancy confirmed that these are the only times they can make reference to.) (ii) The form in (a) was translated as a past imperfective, and contains the suffix aga, which was found in other past-imperfective forms. (iii) The form in (b) was translated as a future, and like the other future forms we collected, contains no suffix. d. Questions: (i) How could one affix (gu!) be both a past-tense affix and a future-tense affix? (ii) What other kinds of distinctions exist within the tense-aspect system of Kikuyu? (Is there a separate past or future tense for ‘two days ago’?...) (5) Another Set of Questions for Future Investigation • So far, we’ve gotten agreement markers for subjects. A big part of this was looking at sentences whose subjects were pronouns (particularly ‘local person’ pronouns). • We’ve not yet asked about sentences with local person direct objects! Those might yield yet another layer of morphological complexity… • We’ve also not looked very much at passive forms of transitive verbs, though we already have some ideas as to their structure… 2. Phonology In order to hypothesize the morphological analyses above, we’ve also had to propose a variety of phonological rules. These rules would take as input the hypothesized underlying forms outputSeth Cable Field Methods Fall 2010 Ling 404 4 by the morphology, and give as output the surface phonological forms that Nancy actually gives as translations. (5) The Vowel-to-W Rule V[+round]  /w/ / ___ a ]VERB A rounded vowel becomes a ‘w’ when it precedes an ‘a’ in the verb. (6) The Vowel Deletion Rule V[-round]  ∅ / ___ V … ]VERB ; UNLESS ___ [ROOT V … An unrounded vowel deletes when it precedes any vowel in the verb, unless that vowel is the first segment of the root. We’ve seen the ‘Vowel-to-W Rule’ at play in the subject agreement morphology of the language, as well as in the morphology of infinitive forms. (7) Illustration of Vowel-to-W Rule a. nĩtwateng’eraga I was running nĩ - tu" - a - teng’er - aga b. kwona to see ku# - ona We’ve seen the vowel-deletion rule at play in the verbal prefixes and suffixes of the