User:Allen Asiimwe

My name is Allen Asiimwe. I am a Ugandan and I live Stellenbosch South Africa at the moment. I work at Makerere University in the department of African Languages as an Assistant Lecturer. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education both from Makerere University, Kampala Uganda. I also hold a Master of Philosophy (Linguistics) from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. At Makerere I teach Runyakitara. Runyakitara is the name given to the four closely related languages, namely Runyankore, Rukiga, Runyoro, and Rutooro, spoken in the south-western part of Uganda. Since the lexical similarity between Runyankore and Rukiga is very high, they are normally referred to as Runyakore-Rukiga, that is, as one language and the same is true for Runyoro and Rutooro. My dialect is Rukiga and all my research so far is on Runyankore-Rukiga.

Allen Asiimwe (2007) Morpho-syntactic Patterns in Runyankore-Rukiga

My Master's degree thesis is of a descriptive nature. The main purpose was to document important grammatical constructions in Runyankore-Rukiga. The introductory chapter describes the nominal and verbal morphology of Runyakore-Rukiga. I then investigate Locative Marking and compare Locative-Inversion across several Bantu languages with Locative Inversion in RR. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever done comprehensive research on locative marking including Runyankore-Rukiga. There is also a chapter on the grammatical functions of the Initial Vowel in Runyakore-Rukiga, an interesting yet neglected area that impacts on almost all parts of grammar of a Bantu language. All the illustrations in Runyankore-Rukiga used in my thesis were glossed using Typecraft.

Together with Dorothee Beermann, I have continued to investigate locative marking in Runyankore-Rukiga. We are currently looking at the morpho-syntax of locative expressions in Runyankore-Rukiga, focusing mainly on the multi-functional nature of the locative classes.

I am committed to doing more research on my mother tongue. I would like to see it develop.

My latest squib on TypeCraft is: A_comparative_analysis_of_Runyankore-Rukiga_and_Luganda_pronominal_agreement. It is still under construction.

At present I am a PhD student under the ADA (African Doctoral Academy) at the Stellenbosch University in South Africa. In my research, I intend to explore the properties of the preprefix (initial vowel) as the role it plays in determining definiteness and specificity in Runyankore-Rukiga. Next to the preprefix other morpho-syntactic parameters that are active in marking definiteness and specificity will also be examined. Can the preprefix be said to play the role of a definite article, is one of the questions that will be answered.