Difference between revisions of "In-depth annotation of multi-verb constructions in Èdó"

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INTRODUCTION

Type craft is a tool for annotation and sharing natural language paradigms online. The main purpose of annotation is to describe the meaning and grammatical structure of languages. Type craft features the following tiers arranged in the following order: 1. Latinsed orthography 2. A tier for morhological analysis 3. A tier for meaning 4. A tier for glossing of morphological features 5. A tier for part of speech information.

Also type craft provides global tags that allows for classification of data along different mophological, syntactic and semantic criteria. In my analysis I have used the following default global tags: construction kernel, situation and aspect, additional predicates, Illocution and polarity

In the following I discuss first general features of Èdó language and then multi-verb constructions in Èdó.

Èdó language: some basic facts

Èdó is a tone language spoken in Èdó state in Mid-Western Nigeria and belongs to the Edoid language group (Elugbe1979). It is a head initial SVO language with an open syllable system with no consonant clusters. The language has seven oral and five nasal vowels. Nasal vowels are distinguished from their oral counterparts by the orthographic convention of an [n] consonant after the nasal vowel. The phonetic representations are as follows:

High front vowel: [ i ]/ [ ĩ ]

High back vowel: [ u ]/ [ ũ ]

Mid-high front vowel: [ e ]

Mid-front back vowel: [ o ]

Mid-low front vowel: [ ε ]/ [ ε̴ ]

Mid-low back vowel: [ Ɔ ]/ [ Ɔ͠ ]

Low central vowel: [ a ]/ [ ã ]

The mid-low front and back vowels [ε] and [Ɔ] have the following orthographic representation respectively ẹ and ọ.

There are two basic tones in Èdó: high (  ) and low (  ). Nominal heads bear constant tones while verbal heads bear relative tones. By relative tones, I mean grammatically and lexically constrained tonal realization. Tones in Èdó have contrastive functions and may serve to distinguish meaning in minimal contrastive forms as depicted in the following examples (Agheyisi 1990:18):

In addition to the two basic tones above, Èdó language has two other tones that are derived. The falling tone and the downstepped high tone. The falling tone is derived when a high tone precedes a low tone as in Ódò [ódô] Potash and Áwà [áwâ] hour in the examples above. In Èdó due to the open syllable pattern of the language when two vowels occur adjacent across word boundaries contraction takes place and tone spreading and tone simplification processes apply. The downstepped high tone is derived when a word ending with a high tone bearing syllable combines with a noun with an initial low tone bearing syllable across word boundaries. In summary, the downstepped high tone is created through the processes of vowel assimilation and contraction (Agheyisi 1990)/vowel elision (Omozuwa 1993), tone spreading and tone simplification. The following example illustrates this:

/òwá/ 'house'+ / èbé / 'book' [òwá!bé]

In annotating Èdó data, the following glosses have been incorporated into the set of glossing tags to account for tonal features in the language.

Glossing tag Tag description

H high tone

!H downstep high

L low tone

Tense

The glossing tags H, !H and L discussed above play a significant role in tense distinction. In addition, a gloss tag RT (Relative Tone) was introduced to account for the past tense suffix –rV.

Tense is marked on the first verbal element after the subject NP, that is, the AUX/ADV if present in a clause or otherwise on the verb. It may be realized as tones: past tense high(  ) and present tense low(  ) or high (  ), a suffix: past –rV, or a lexical item: future tense ghá. Tone marking on verbs encodes tense and transitivity information. For CV intransitive verbs, present tense is marked as a high tone and for transitive verbs it is marked as a low tone.

For CV transitive verbs with direct objects realized in canonical positions, past tense is marked as a high tone.

The past suffix attaches to intransitive verbs and transitive verbs when their objects are not realized or are focalized in non-canonical positions. The suffix has seven allomorphs -re (dẹ́-rè "bought"), -ri (fí-rì "threw"), -ru (sún-rùn "smooth"), -ro (ròró-rò "thought"), -rin (hín-rìn "climbed"), -run (súnrùn "smooth") and ren (gbẹ́n-rẹ̀n "wrote"). It harmonizes with the final vowel of the verb stem it is affixed to.

For transitive CVCV verbs marking past time, the final syllable obligatorily has a high tone while the initial syllable may be high or low. This also applies to the intransitive CVCV verb in the past and in addition the -rV suffix is attached to the verb stem. Transitive CVCV verbs marking present tense have a sequence of low low tone marking while intransitive verbs have low high tone marking. Past tense in some preverbal CVCV adverbs is marked as a high-downstepped-high tone and a low-high pattern in the present.The following examples illustrates this.

Verbs, number and iteration representation

Most verbs in Èdó can be inflected for the purpose of pluralizing nouns that occur with them or to mark repeated action.The verb stem to which a plural suffix attaches always bears a low tone. In addition, the last vowel on the verb root determines the form of the vowel on the plural suffix. There are six allomorphs of the plural suffix -lẹ (dẹ̀-lẹ "buy iterated" ), -le (sè-le "sew iterated"), -lo (fì-lo "throw iterated"), -lọ(tà-lọ "talk iterated"), -nẹ (gbèn-nẹ "write-iterated") and -nọ (tìn-nọ "fly iterated"). For transitive verbs with a participant bearing the grammatical function of the direct object, the direct object is interpreted as plural when the verb has plural suffixation. In addition, the event may be interpreted as iterative.

For verbs with only one argument which bears the subject grammatical function, the subject is interpreted as plural in the presence of plural suffixation on the verb and with the exception of accusative verbs,the event depicted by the verb may be interpreted as iterated event.

Order of plural and past suffixes affixation

Intransitive verbs and transitive verbs with focalized objects that encode past tense and plural information have the following order of affixation: Verbs stem + Plural suffix + past tense suffix.

WORD FORMATION PROCESSES

There are two word categories in Èdó: content and function words. Content words consist of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs while function words consist of determiners, prepositions, pronouns and complementizers. Nouns and verbs make up more than 80% of the content words in Èdó (Agheyisi 1990:29). Three strategies are used in word formation processes: affixation, compounding and reduplication. Content words may or may not be derived while function words generally consist of basic words.In the following I discuss first content words and then function words.

Nouns

Nouns are formed from verb stems through the processes of affixation and compounding. First I discuss prefixation processes and compounding. The following examples are from Agheyisi (1990:32-33) and Omoruyi (1986:17-18).