A dependency grammar approach to the study of word order changes in Swahili declarative sentence

Much study has been done on Swahili sentence structures. The present work is a further contribution to these efforts. It attempts to study word order changes in a Swahili declarative sentence from a dependency grammar viewpoint. In studying word order changes in a Swahili declarative sentence this work has addressed itself specifically to sentences which deviate from the SVO (A) norm. The sentences dealt with are those with OVS, OSV, SOV, VOS, VSO, (A) SVO and S(A)VO patterns. These patterns are not fully discussed anywhere by Swahili grammar and scholars. The work is organised in five chapters, The first chapter presents the background to the study. It gives a brief account of the previous studies on word order changes in languages in general from the gramatical and the communicative points of view. The second chapter deals with the theoretical frame work of the study namely the dependency grammar. It is devoted to the description of the major aspects of the dependency grammar. Chapters three and four form the main body of the work. Throughout these chapters I have attempted to justify the assumptions that a verb is the governing element in a Swahili declarative sentence and that word order changes in a sentence have particular communicative effects. As a governing element in a sentences, it is noted that a Swahili verb is capable of expressing the subject and object nouns by means of the affixes, and that this characteristic enables it to stand alone as a complete self sufficient utterance. It also enables the nouns in a sentence to change positions without affecting their grammatical relations. It is argued that the elements occurring in the sentence initial position be it subject, object, adverbial or subordinate clause is usually the topic, that is the known or contextually presupposed element.' The topic provides the ground work to the speaker and hearer before the main predication, that is the new information, is conveyed. It is also noted that in speech the topic, that is the known or contextually presupposed element is usually omitted. It is the comment, the actual information to be conveyed, which is normally presented to the hearer. Thus the communicative structure is characterised by omissions of the known or contextually presupposed elements. In chapter five it is concluded that a Swahili declarative sentence may be analysed from the grammatical and communicative viewpoints. The former analysis gives the grammatical relations of the elements in a sentence with reference to the verb and the latter identifies the communicative effect of the elements in a sentence with reference to their position in the structure. However, the two analyses do interplay in that whichever the structure one looks at the elements in it have both the grammatical and communicative functions. Hence in studying a sentence structure both the grammatical and communicative components ought to be given due attention if we are to understand how language works in a speech community.