ASPECTS OF MORPHOSYNTAX IN C’LELA

Abstract

ABSTRACT In linguistic morphology, inflected word forms of lexemes are usually organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules. The aspect of morphology that shows the relationship between morphology and syntax is referred to as morpho-syntax. This study examined aspects of morphosyntactic structure in C’Lela. The analyses of the data revealed that C’Lela class prefixes and suffixes show no predictable meaning when used in isolation because the forms are empty of syntactic meaning unless they are affixed with the right morpheme based on the target elements such as the nouns, verbs and adjectives. The study also explored different kinds of agreements between various classes of word where a class prefix agree with the second word form in which features of the initial word form are moved to agree with the second root morpheme in morphosyntactic construction. Data for this research was elicited through interaction with native informants. Descriptive method is used in conducting this research and the data was analyzed using the item-and-arrangement approach of morphological structure analysis. The study also presents the data mainly in the form of words and phrases.