The morphosyntax of the Keiyo verb

Abstract

This study is a description of the morphosyntax of the Keiyo Verb using the Mirror Principle theory. A number of puzzles exist as far as the structure and ordering of morphemes within the Keiyo Verb is concerned. They include: the ability of the verb to conjugate inflectional and derivational morphemes thus forming a complex verb structure and the presence of underlying morphosyntactic factors that dictate the patterning of its morphemes. The study‘s objectives were to: identify and describe the inflectional and derivational morphemes in the KV, identify the patterns of affix ordering, establish and analyse the morphosyntactic constraints that affect the patterning of these affixes and finally test the adequacy of the mirror principle in accounting for facts within the KV. Data on the Keiyo Verb was collected using native speaker intuition. The collected structures were then verified by adult native Keiyo speakers. Data analysis involved the use of conventional tree diagrams and tables. From the analysis it was established that: all inflectional morphemes are prefixed except those that mark present tense and progressive aspect whereas all derivational morphemes are suffixed. Furthermore, Inflectional morphemes have the following order: tense > negation > agreement > perfective aspect > person/ number > root verb. This order is fixed. On the other hand derivational morphemes exhibited many different orders such as verb > andative > aspect /progressive, verb> applicative>aspect/progressive>reciprocal, verb > applicative > andative > aspect/ progressive. Furthermore, the order of inflectional morphemes is influenced by the order of sentential elements and semantic relevance. The mirror principle theory states that there is a relationship between Morphology and syntax. It states that any morphological change results to a syntactic change. The order of these affixes is influenced by the semantic relevance to the verbal semantics, the sentence structure of a given language and co-occurrence of elements that occur together. The Mirror principle theory was used to analyse and establish the morphosyntactic constraints within the Keiyo verb. It was able to account for the fixed order of morphemes, prefixation of inflectional morphemes that mark negation, present tense, perfective aspect, number/person and the suffixation of derivational morphemes namely: applicative, venitive, causative, reciprocal and andative. It also accounted for why affixes like person/ number are prefixed closer to the verb than the past tense morpheme which is affixed far from the verb. However, it did not account for the suffixation of aspect/ progressive and present tense morphemes yet they are inflectional morphemes. Finally, theta theory was used to account for suffixation of derivational morphemes.