Volume 4, Number 4

The Structure of Simple Sentence in Mesqan: A South Ethio-semitic Language Spoken in Ethiopia

  Authors

OusmanShafi, Wollo University, Ethiopia

  Abstract

Mesqanis a Gurage language belonging to the South Ethio-Semitic division of the Ethio Semitic language group which is mainly used in day-to-day communication by a population of about179,737 people in the Gurage Zone, Ethiopia, whose linguistic features were not well described.Foreign and Ethiopian scholars undertook several studies on Gurage languages including Mesqan. However, most of the works on Mesqan focus only on data for its genetic classification in relation to other Gurage languages. So, in order to document the grammar of Mesqan, whose speakers are nowadays mainly bilingual, a descriptive work is a very urgent need. The central aimof this paper isto provide a comprehensive description and features of Simple Sentencestructures of the Mesqan Language. The paper is descriptive in nature, since the study is mainly concerned with describing what is actually being in the language, and mainly relies on primary linguistic data.The linguistic data, i.e. the elicited grammatical data concerning the structure of simple sentence, was collected from native speakers of the language during 12 months of fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2012 in four Mesqan villages and in Butajira, the administrative center of the MesqanWoreda.The most frequent word order in simple sentence is subject-object-verb (SOV). The position of adverbs is not fixed, but they always precede the verb. The sentence-initial position is the topic position and mostly nouns. Topicalization may trigger a change in the order of constituents when the topic is not the subject of the sentence, as in questions with interrogative pronouns.

  Keywords

Topicalization, Topic, Constituents, Interrogative, Pronouns, Word order, Precede, Initial