Abstract
Basaa, a Narrow Bantu language, A 43, spoken in Cameroon in Central Africa holds a serious record of descriptive works in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Verb morphology has been studied in detail by Bitja’a Kody (2000), Dimmendaal (1988), Hyman (2003) among others. The present paper focusing on verb derivation raises two main issues: the paradigm of expansions that are recurrent in the language on the one hand, and extensions for which suggest the existence of additional suffixes to what is already reported on the other hand. Further extensions are the perfective, the associative, and the tentative. This paper ends up with an attempt to reconstruct Basaa extensions, mirroring the Proto-Bantu propositions from Schadeberg (2003).
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how verbs are constructed in Basaa, a Narrow Bantu language (A43) spoken in Cameroon
As Schmidt (1994), followed by Mutaka and Bitjaa Kody (2000), and Sandy (2012) for Abo (A42), point out, Vowel Height Harmony is a process by which the vowel of the verbal stem changes its aperture to a higher level, triggered by the extensive suffix that is added to it
This section on verbal extensions goes a little beyond the work on verbal morphology presented in Hyman (2003) and Bitjaa Kody (1990)
Summary
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how verbs are constructed in Basaa (ɓàsàá), a Narrow Bantu language (A43) spoken in Cameroon. Verbal derivatives have been examined in previous studies, e.g., Bitjaa Kody (1990), Dimmendaal (1988), Hyman (2000, 2003), and Voorhoeve (1980), among others. As in many other Bantu languages, are a combination of the lexical root and one or two extensions. The structure of the verbal stem is : [RADICAL – (EXPANSION) – EXTENSIVE SUFFIX]. Two aspects of Baasa verb morphology are studied here: morphological expansion and extensions. The structure of the paper is as follows: in section 2, an overview of Baasa phonology is presented.
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