Browsing by Author "Hukuru, Denis"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Phrase structure and functional categories in the kirundi sentence
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 2003) Hukuru, Denis
    This study tackles the analysis of the Kirundi sentence according to the concepts of “phrase structure” (PS) and “functional categories” (FCs) as defined in the Principles and Parameters (P&P) Theory. P&P Theory is a linguistic theory developed in the 1980s and early 1990s by Chomsky (1981, 1986, Chomsky and Lasnik 1993) and his followers (Webelhuth 1995, Cook and Newson 1996). The study describes the syntactic behaviour of Kirundi FCs, their distribution in the Sentence and their functions, as well as their morphological structure. In so doing the study checks whether the major claims and hypotheses of the P&P Theory about FCs in general syntax apply or do not apply to Kirundi syntactic structures. The study realized two major findings. The first finding is that inflection (INFL) is not a category of phrase, because it belongs to the word morphology. This has been referred to as the WORD INTERNAL INFLECTION HYPOTHESIS (WIIHI WIIH assumes that phrase structure grammar should deal with fully inflected words. According to this new hypothesis, only FCs morphologically realised as full words are phrase constituents and may be heads of phrases, but inflectional FCs cannot. WIIH replaces the Split-INFL Hypothesis (SIH) and (ii) the Full Functional Projection Hypothesis (FFPH), which assume that in all languages, all FCs, whatever their morphological structure, are phrase constituents and heads of phrases. However, in agglutinative languages like Kirundi and other Bantu languages, SIH and FFPH may not work, because inflectional FCs fail to be accommodated in phrase structure. However, it was observed that all full word FCs function as heads of phrases, this has led to a new hypothesis, namely, the FULL WORD FUNCTIONAL HYPOTHESIS (FWFPH), which is a compromise between WIIH and FFPH. The second major finding of the study is that syntactic structure interacts with discourse structure. Many Kirundi syntactic structures may not be interpretable if one ignores discourse functions of Topic and Focus. The BASIC TOPIC PHRASE STRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS (BTSH) is one of the important devices suggested in his study to deal with kirundi phrase structure in higher sentence nodes. The wider significance or implication of this finding is that the interpretation of the sentence structure can no more rely on purely syntactic functions. The involvement of discourse functions in phrase structure weakens the Autonomous Syntactic Principle (ASP). ASP denies the role of non-syntactic features functions in syntactic descriptions. However, for some Kirundi specific constructions, the key for their interpretation has been found to be both semantic and discourse functions.