Some Aspects of Noun Inflectional Morphology in Mosittacha Language

Abstract

This study provides the descriptions of some aspect inflectional morphology in the Mosittacha language in the western variety. It identifies occurrence patterns of morphemes and draws rules for inflections in the language. A degree of fusion of morphs and morphological occurrences of inflectional formatives has been thoroughly dealt with. This thesis describes the inflectional forms of essential nouns. However, words occurring in the subject position (nominals) and nouns and pronouns are mostly the ones that undergo inflection, they determine the inflectional characteristics of the language. This thesis consists of five chapters that are concerned, respectively with the, first chapter presenting a brief account of the Mosiye people, the second chapter dealing with the concept of noun and their classification, with some related concepts and previous works on Mosittacha, nominal inflection (including nouns, pronouns, and adjectives), and gender, Number (singulative, plurative), definiteness and case are considered in the nominal inflection. The third chapter addresses methodology used for collecting data and interpreting it in order to meet its objective. This study used basic wordlists and story with elicitation methods the obtained data were finally analyzed. The fourth chapter treats the morpheme distribution of noun in the variety. The last chapter deals with the conclusion and recommendation of the study. The findings in this study were that nouns in Mosittacha are not overtly marked in gender, nouns end mostly with suffixes in ‘ta’ and as a plural marker and the singular marker ‘n’ morpheme. The nouns have overt plural markers. This study initiates further research that could be conducted on other aspects of noun derivational morphology. For example, inflections based on derived nouns and phrases could be studied in detail and comprehensively.