Abstract:
The paper examines the form and meaning of the Arusa
dialect of the Maa verb extensions. Verb expansion aspects in
the Maa language are not interesting for scholars to study at
all. It is this study that was interested in examining the Maa
verb expansion. Case study design and qualitative approach
were used in studying the Maa language. The unstructured
interview was applied in data collection; thus, six informants
of Arusa native speakers were used for data collection due to
their competence in writing and speaking the Maa. The data
were presented by using Leipzig Glossing Rules which
constitute three levels namely: word order or parsing level,
the literal translation, and the free translation level. The
Cognitive Grammar and Morpheme-based morphology
theories were tools used for data analysis. The study found
that -in-, -i-, -e- are causative; -ta-, -to- reciprocal, -ki applicative; -i- stative and -ki- passive allomorphs in Arusa.
In view of these allomorphs -ki- and -i- are semantically
cyclic in the sense that -ki- has dual meaning as in passive
and applicative and -i- can be semantically stative or
causative. Syntactically, both -ki- and -i- function as valency
decreasing or increasing. For this fact Cognitive Grammar
Theory exhausts these forms of complexity and those
without cyclic as in -to-, -ta- and -e-, -in- are handled by
morpheme-based theory as it accounts for the semantics of
different verb exponents. In general, peculiarities in shapes,
types, meanings and categories of Arusa verbal morphs need
a comparative study of Maa and other language families for
theoretical harmonization
