Pseudo-Reduplication in Lukisa Dialect

Abstract

Reduplication is a grammatical aspect found in a wide range of African languages and it is sometimes interchangeably used with repetition. Reduplication is both a morphological and a phonological process of forming a compound word by repeating all or part of the word. Morphological reduplication involves semantic change through another word formation process while phonological reduplication is where the copying pics the closest phonological input restricted to cases of phonological necessity. Lukisa, a Luhya dialect is expected to exhibit a range of patterns in reduplication which varies from a single segment being copied to an entire phrase. Although linguistic forms of reduplication have been explored at lexical and functional levels, there is need to validate morphological doubling involving the creation of new stem type reduplication as a limitless linguistic resource, a central meaning making strategy and a naturally integrated facility in language. Therefore, the objective of this study is to establish how pseudo reduplication manifests in Lukisa reduplication. Inkelas and Zoll (2005) Morphological Doubling Theory was adopted for this study where morphology calls twice for a constituent of a given semantic description with possible phonological modification of either or both constituents. MDT is a native identity theory in the sense that the surface phonological identity between the two copies occurs as a side effect of semantic identity.