A description of the morphosyntactic structure of the Suba language

Abstract

Suba language has no known documented evidence of a description of any aspect of its grammar. A sytematic description of a language empowers a language for public use gives it a utilitarian value and also preserves it for future generation. This study therefore set out to describe the morphosyntactic structure of the Suba language. The objectives of the study were: To identify the morphological elements of Suba language, to describe the rules of combination of the morphological units in Suba language, to identify the basic syntactic structures of the Suba language and finally to establish the inter-relatedness between the Suba morphology and its syntax. The study took a qualitative approach with the descriptive research design. It was guided by the theory of distributed morphology introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz. The theory demonstrates the inter-relatedness between the various components of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics). Data was collected in Mfangano Island, which is a homogeneous set up of Suba indigenous people. A sample of forty elders were purposively selected to provide the data Focus group discussion and elicitation methods were used to collect a corpus of the Suba language which was recorded through audio taping and field notes. The recorded data was then analyzed using the item-and-arrangement approach of morphological smicture analysis. This revealed that Suba language is a highly agglutinating language with considerable prefixing and suffixing. The primitives of word formation are the abstract and functional morphanes which undergo morphological altemations and concatenations in the procms of word formation.