The Swot of Valency Increasing and Decreasing Augments in South Pare Language: A Morph Syntactic Analysis

Abstract

The paper sets out the valency changes in the South Pare dialect spoken in Mwamba Vunta and Chome Suji divisions of the same district, following the fact that the language is understudied on the topic under discussion. Two theories were used for data analysis, namely: Item - and - Arrangement theory and Theta (Ɵ-role) theory. The former assumes that morphological forms <morphemes> are linearly arranged and that when attached to the verbs, they change the semantics of the word apart from the original and the latter shows the function and the roles of the noun phrase in a given syntactic structure, as in external & internal theta. In arriving at answers, an unstructured interview was used by bilingual South Pare native speakers aged 46 and 50 respectively. One of the two is a trilingual speaker as he speaks English, Kigweno and Kiswahili languages, the rest is a bilingual speaker of Kigweno and Kiswahili. The Leipzig Glossing Rule was used for data analysis. It was found that applicative morphs in Kipare are: -i- and -ir-, causative morphs: -sh-, -ɪsh-, -esh- and-ɪz-, passive morphs: -w- and -iw-, stative: -ik- and -an-reciprocal in Kipare. It was also observed that: i- and -ir-, -sh-, -ɪsh-, -esh- and-ɪz- are valency increasing and -w-, -iw-, -ik- and -an-reciprocal are valency decreasing augments in Pare language. It is recommended that Pare language has other areas which need investigation: inversive, repetitive and idiophonic, as well as affixed ordering of verb extensions. These need to be investigated to see their characteristics pertinent to valency changes