Morphosemantics of Diminutive Morphemes in C’LELA
Journal Title: Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences - Year 2017, Vol 5, Issue 12
Abstract
This paper deals with the diminutives in C’lela. It examines the morphosemantic features of diminutive morphemes (–wa) and (–i’) in C’lela. The paper discusses the form and the various meaning associated with diminutives in the language. The information for this research was gathered from unstructured interviews with native informants. Other set of data was sourced from the extant literature on diminutives. The paper explores the basic meaning as well as the evaluative meaning of diminutives in C’lela. The study finds that, like in many other languages, C’lela diminutives primarily express the notion of smallness of size, shape and space, young, female and sometimes, used with negative connotations such as despise, insignificant or emaciation. The study shows that diminutives forms in C’lela can be identified by a regular morphological formation involving the (wa-) and (i’-) prefixes in most cases attached to the underlying base words that could be analyzed as deriving from a base found in a possibly related animate and inanimate nouns. It reveals that C’lela is an SVO language with masculine and feminine genders; however, these two diminutive affixes are not amenable to these two grammatical genders. Keywords: C’lela, diminutives, morphosemantics, basic meaning, evaluative meaning
Authors and Affiliations
Muhammad Ango Aliero
Keywords
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