A Comparative Morphological Analysis of Lamnsó and the English Compound Words

A Comparative Morphological Analysis of Lamnsó and the English Compound Words

Abstract:

A morphological analysis is crucial for language structures and patterns to be understood. The growing need for linguistic analysis has triggered a lot of research and analysis of natural languages. Lamnsó Linguists are waking up to this call and this Research titled A Comparative Morphological Analysis of Lamnsó and English Compound Words is one of such efforts. The researcher was motivated by the fact that Lamnsó is still very understudied and underdeveloped. Also the Lamnsó lexicon by Karl Grebe does not have compound words and this can make one to feel that Lamnsó is void of compound words. In this regard, the compound words were carefully put together by the researcher while at the same time describing and explaining the morphological structures and patterns. This whole idea was geared towards realizing or coming up with a systematic morphological data that could develop, document, and preserve the language, and thus rescue it from dying out. This Lamnsó data is compared with that of the English language to bring out similarities and differences. The English language data was gathered from both primary and secondary sources while the lamnsó data is framed based on Lamnsó that is spoken in Bui Division, in the North West Region of Cameroon. The morphological analysis also incorporates syntactic, semantic, and Pragmatic elements. The Lamnsó patterns and structures fit into the universal criteria and this has enabled a comparative study of this magnitude to be successfully carried out on this two language systems. The English compound types are endocentric, exocentric, copulative, and appositional while the Lamnsó types are linked, composed, Juxtaposed, and the phrasal compounds. Lamnsó compound realization involves the compounding of two lexemes which may or may not be independent and also via reduplication. The Lamnsó orthography used in this work is taken from Grebe (2008). This work has been able to identify, examine, classify, and analyse lamnsó compound words. The study has established and proven the functions of the Lamnsó compounds as compound nouns, compound verbs, compound adjectives, adverbs, etc. Hence, they are meaningful lexical elements and can have their own dictionary entries.

A Comparative Morphological Analysis of Lamnsó and the English Compound Words