Morphosyntactic Study of Dholuo Verb Phrase

Abstract

Dholuo is a Nilo-Saharan language spoken by about 4.06 million people according to the Kenyan census that was done in 2009 and the result formally released in 2010.The language is spoken by the Luo who are mainly living in Kenya. The Dholuo verb phrase, because of its agglutinative nature is very complicated. Tense and agreement in the Dholuo verb phrase was investigated because it had not been fully studied by earlier scholars. The purpose of the study was to analyze the agreement in pro-drop in Dholuo verb phrase. Principles and Parameters (Chomsky 1981) formed the theoretical framework of the study. The objectives of the study were:  to describe the morphological elements of the Dholuo verb phrase and also to identify and explain features of agreement in the Dholuo verb phrase. The study was analytical and so the researcher intended to use analytical research design to study and account for the validity of Principles and Parameters to analyse Dholuo verb phrase. Permission to undertake the research was granted by Rongo University, NACOSTI, Ministry of education and the county government of Kenya. The study being done in the native language of the researcher, data was generated by the researcher and only purposely interviewed twenty native Dholuo speakers in Nyan'giela village for verifications. Non –probability sampling was used because the research was interested in the representativeness of the concepts in their varying forms this maximized the scope or range of variation of study. Purposive sampling of non-probability sampling was also used. The data generated by the researcher was studied according to the number, tense, voice, negation and person. Syntactic analysis was done in line with tenets of Principles and Parameters. The data was analyzed and after the presentation of data, the study concluded that Dholuo is a pro-drop language with features of agreements mainly marked by pronouns and affixes.