Examining the forms and meaning of the Arusa dialect of the Maa verb expansions

Abstract

The paper examines the form and meaning of the Arusa dialect of the Maa verb extensions. Verb expansion aspects in the Maa language are not interesting for scholars to study at all. It is this study that was interested in examining the Maa verb expansion. Case study design and qualitative approach were used in studying the Maa language. The unstructured interview was applied in data collection; thus, six informants of Arusa native speakers were used for data collection due to their competence in writing and speaking the Maa. The data were presented by using Leipzig Glossing Rules which constitute three levels namely: word order or parsing level, the literal translation, and the free translation level. The Cognitive Grammar and Morpheme-based morphology theories were tools used for data analysis. The study found that -in-, -i-, -e- are causative; -ta-, -to- reciprocal, -kiapplicative; -i- stative and -ki- passive allomorphs in Arusa. In view of these allomorphs -ki- and -i- are semantically cyclic in the sense that -ki- has dual meaning as in passive and applicative and -i- can be semantically stative or causative. Syntactically, both -ki- and -i- function as valency decreasing or increasing. For this fact Cognitive Grammar Theory exhausts these forms of complexity and those without cyclic as in -to-, -ta- and -e-, -in- are handled by morpheme-based theory as it accounts for the semantics of different verb exponents. In general, peculiarities in shapes, types, meanings and categories of Arusa verbal morphs need a comparative study of Maa and other language families for theoretical harmonization.