Verbal Morphology of Runyankore Language

Abstract

An academic study entitled “Verbal Morphology of Runyankore language,” was carried out in Uganda. This study was warranted by the fact that very few scholars have studied and written about this language, and yet the government language policy - basing on thematic curriculum - of teaching lower primary school classes, emphasises using local languages as media of instruction. Such a policy to be fully implemented requires text books written in and about those local languages. However, for Runyankore, very few such books have been written. So the study came timely to bridge the gap.The study was guided by Generative morphology theory, especially models of Halle and Aronoff. These scholars propounded four basic principles of morphological analysis of any language. Namely: A list of morphemes; Word formation rules; a Dictionary and a Sieve. According to these scholars, any person to analyse language, particularly morphology, requires knowledge about types of morphemes  that form words in a given language, should also know patterns that those morphemes follow in word formation, which create word formation rules; should further be aware that not all words are formed by those rules, this is to say that, some words are sieved into the language from other languages, without necessarily  following basic rules of that language, and finally, all those words, whether  governed by rules or not, make up a dictionary of that language.  Out of the four afore mentioned principles advanced by Halle and his compatriot, the researcher was mainly guided by three of them; for instance, he used a dictionary to collect some verbs that were used in the analysis, since he employed both library and field methods of research. While analysing those verbs, different morphs that are affixed to roots and stems of verbs were identified, and finally, patterns that those morphs follow during inflectional and derivational processes, which in turn make word formation rules in Runyankore, were examined.The study, among other observations, found out that; Since Runyankore is a Bantu language, and Bantu languages are agglutinating in nature, a Runyankore verb is a complex entity.  One verb root is capable of appearing with many different morphemes and each morpheme serving a different linguistic function such as: pronominal agreements, tense markers, personal pronoun, aspect, mood, reflexive marker, object infix, negation marker and voice markers, in a phrase or sentence. When these morphs are affixed to the root, they appear as a single entity as shown in the extracts that will follow.