Examining the morphological processes in the formation of Tupuri nominals

Abstract

The current work examines the morphological processes that are observable in the formation of nominals in Tupuri, a Niger-Congo language spoken in the South West of Chad and in the North of the Republic of Cameroon. Structuralism was adopted as a theoretical approach in this paper. Forty (40) native speakers of ɓāŋlíŋ dialect, i.e. eight (8) from each of towns/villages Sere, Dawa, Mindaore, Lale, and Guwe were randomly selected to collect data based on a Swadesh words-list. The data revealed that the formation of nominals in Tupuri language is characterized by pre-fixation, suffixation, total reduplication, partial reduplication, total modification, and partial modification, which include subtraction and neutralization. Furthermore, compounding is another process that characterizes the formation of nouns in Tupuri language.