A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF KULUNG LANGUAGE

A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF KULUNG LANGUAGE

Abstract:

This study is a syntactic description of Kulung, a member of Southern Jarawa of the Bantu group of the Benue-Congo family of the Niger-Congo phylum. The study seeks to describe those grammatical categories in Kulung that permits a native speaker of Kulung to speak and be understood by the member of the speech community. The knowledge of words and their meanings and the way they are pronounced, the syntactic environment where theyco-occur and their syntactic compositions. The objective of the study, however, is the overall explication of the knowledge Kulung native speaker has in relation to his/her language. This special sort of knowledge can be represented as a set of rules or principles. The study examines the nature of the rules and the elements that make them useful for describing the syntactic competence of the Kulung native speaker. Thus intra-sentential hierarchies, i.e. phrases and clauses as lexical composites and sentential constituencies comprised part of the data for analysis. It has been observed that two types of relations exist in the structure of human language, horizontal and vertical (precedence and dominance). Horizontally, sentence is arranged in a linear sequence in terms of occurrence, the noun precedes the verb; the verb precedes the object in the data. Vertically, structures are organized in hierarchy, phrasal categories dominate lexical categories. The noun phrase for example has the noun or pronoun as its constitutional integrity. The research report employs multiple tools, interview, participant, observation and the use of secondary sources which are the printed texts available in the language. The researcher is a native speaker also part of the data is by introspection. This study sees Kulung language as having a basic canonical SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT order throughout. That SVO is the only permissible order of the basic constituents in simple declarative sentences is confirmed by data available from this study. Kulung is both agglutinative and synthetic language. It has no gender distinction but has constraints on the morphosyntactic features of the verb which shows agreement in number and tense. In Kulung empty words such as ir:, yaba are the properties of the verb which are markers of present and future tenses. The past tense is marked by inflection

A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF KULUNG LANGUAGE