SWAHILI: AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE DETERMINER PHRASE ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION:
(Ki) Swahili is an agglutinative language which is derived from the immediate family of the Northeast coast Bantu languages in a broader sense. As a language from Afro-Asiatic (AA) group of languages it demonstrates a tendency towards inflection (Myachina 1981:22) Though spoken as a mother tongue in a wide ranges of places in an East African Urheimat; such as South Somalia, North Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya (Pete, Lamu, Pemba, Zanzibar, and Mafia), Uganda, Congo, Burindi, Zambia, Malawi, Zaire, Mozambique, Madagascar, and the Comoro Islands – speakers are also found in Oman, included are the United Arab Emirates. It is spoken in many other places as a second language (Myachina, 2). There are some fifty-million (50,000,000) speakers of this language worldwide. As a Southern Cushitic subgroup (Heine 2000: 81,95) of Bantu language the term “Swahili” is derived from the Arabic term “Sahila” meaning “coast” and forms part of the proto-Bantu family of languages. Since it also belongs to the eastern group of Bantu languages which displays Myamweze as a language, and dialects such as those from the Iramba plateau, Pokomo, Taita, Taweta, including the Kilimanjaro Hill Tribes, Djaga, Mishi, Meru, Pare, included Asu from the Sambala dispensation, Bondei, Zigula, Zaramo, Sagra, Gogo, Hehe, Pogoro, Baena, especially Makonde, all form certain distinguishing patterns. Nurse and Spear (1985: 39) see the language though influenced mainly from Arabic through trade and other cultural contacts as one maintaining a technical vocabulary from proto-Bantu times in the Stone Age. A Latin script derived from proto-Sanaitic aleph-bet forms its backbone. MORPHOPHONEMICS FOCUS: SOME SWAHILI NOMINALS AND CONCORDIAL PREFIXES
Present day Swahili is mainly an S V O language. It shares this feature with most Romance Languages like, Latin, French, Italian, Romanian, and many others. This includes Chinese (cf. Hariehausen 1990, cf Dyer 2006:7) and Bulgarian. The example in (1) shows Swahili S V O word order.
(1) Ni - li - kul – a
s v o (ind) (c.f. Deen 2005:187)
“I ate it”

Proto-Swahili /Bantu used traditionally 22 noun clauses. Presently sixteen are in usage.
Some examples used in (2).

Noun classes, (1 & 2) ie. “persons/prefixes/m/mu/wa/ as in m-toto; “child”(sing.); wa-toto (pl.) “children” (3 & 4) “nature” /m/mu/mi/ as in m-to; “river” mi-to “rivers”. (5 & 6) “class” /ji/ma/ as in jitu; “giant”
ma-jitu “giants (7 & 8). “inanimate” /ki/ma/ as in ki-tabu, vi-tabu, “books”
( 9 & 11). Abstract nouns, mass nouns /n/u/as in n-gurumo, “thunder” U-zuri, “beauty” (zuri-beautiful) (15 & 16). “verbal nouns” /ku/pa/s/ in ku-soma “reading” pa-moja “together” ( 16 & 17) /ku/mu/ as in mu-ngu “god creator”.
When Bernstein (2008: 1250) constructs between NP and DP are applied in semantic and
a functional term to his predicate/arguments with regards Swahili lexical heads, nouns and verbs interesting data can be culled. Note Swahili contains no (null) determiners.

Thus determinerless nominals predicate rules the day. For example the following examples in (3):

(a) Omino amewasili leo (Omino has arrived today)
(b) Omino amewasili kuyu sika (Omino has arrived day)

The obvious Np in 3 (a) follows a reasoning of Stowell (1989) and Longobardi c.f
Bernstein 1994: 1251) as a predicate and not DP as an argument. Though mention is made of the DP function and the adjoining clause can assume a predicate as opposed to obvious argument. Whilst 3 (b) contains the recipe of “definitive nominal phrase” using the morpheme as a determiner phrase this day. (Bernstein, 1257) shows true argument.


BIBLIOGRAPHYAnderson, S.R., “Inflectional Morphology” ed. Shopen, Timothy, Language Typology and Syntactic Descriptive: Grammatical Categories and Lexicon, Vol. II, 1985, p. 250 -2001.

Bernstein, Judy B., Reformulating the Determiner Phrase Analysis, Language and Linguistics Compass, Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 1246-1270.

Deen, K., The Acquisition of Swahili, J. Benjamin Publishers Co, Aneston Philadelphia,
2005, p.185.

Dyer, M.S. World Order Clause Structure, Language Typology and Syntactic Descriptions, Vol. I, ed. by Shopen, Timothy, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 7.

Haman, E., Early Productivity in Derivation Case Study of Diminutives in Acquisition of Polish, Psychology of Language and Communication, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2003, p. 39.

Heine, B., A, African Languages An Introduction, ed. Nurse, D., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, p. 81 & 95.

Myachina, E.N., Swahili Language: A Descriptive Grammar, Trans. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1981, 2 & 22.

Nurse, D. &, Spear T.T., Swahili Reconstructing The History and Language of An African Society 800-1500, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1985, p. 39

Y.T. MODEIRE