| dc.description.abstract | Reduplication is a grammatical aspect that occurs in human language in which a whole linguistic constituent or part of it is repeated to form a new constituent. Reduplication can be both a morphological and phonological process of forming a compound word by repeating all or part of a word. Morphological reduplication involves semantic change through another word formation process while phonological duplication is where the copying picks the closest phonological input restricted to cases of phonological necessity repeated exactly or with a slight change. Lukisa, a Luhya dialect, is expected to exhibit reduplication patterns which vary from a single element being copied to an entire phrase through morphoplogical reduplication which involves the creation of a new stem type and phonological doubling which entirely depict reduplication as a limitless linguistic resource and a naturally integrated facility in language. The focus of this study is to explore the manifestation of morphophonological reduplication in Lukisa dialect. The purpose of this study was to analyze MorphoPhonological reduplication in Lukisa. The objectives of the study were to: establish the morpho semantic features of reduplication in Lukisa dialect, describe the manifestation of phonological copying in Lukisa dialect and explore how pseudo reduplication is manifest in Lukisa dialect. Inkelas and Zoll’s (2005) Morphological Doubling Theory (MDT) was adopted for this study where the aspect of reduplication results when morphology calls twice for the constituents of a given semantic description with a possible phonological modification of either or both constituents. A Descriptive Research Design was employed in this study. The study was carried out in Khwisero Sub County of Kakamega County. The study population was the native Lukisa dialect speakers. The study targeted a sample of 20 Lukisa native speakers purposively sampled from 208 members of Buchero Educational and Cultural Society to provide data for this study. Three written texts on Lukisa oral literature and history were purposively sampled to provide data for analysis through Focus Group Discussions. Native speaker intuition and competence of the principal researcher also enabled more data collection and to ascertain data authentication process. A pilot study on FGDs was used to ensure that there was the validity and reliability. Data was qualitatively analyzed through content analysis of the morphemes, stems, roots and lexical items with reference to the corpus of reduplication cases to bring out the morphosemantics of reduplication that changed or maintained the word classes, the phonological processes of copying of vowel lengthening, vowel change and syllable weight and linguistic pseudo reduplication in which the inputs cannot be separately analyzed. The findings were presented through thematic description and explained through themes and sub themes. The study revealed that in Lukisa, semantics is a linguistic phenomenon that is part of the morphology of reduplication. The reduplication results to notions such as: diminution, frequentativeness and augmentation. The research further revealed that various lexical categories such as verbs, nouns and adverbs manifested phonological copying processes of duplication where there was the doubling of a sound in a given phonological environment, at times with some alteration of the sound through the processes of vowel lengthening, vowel substitution and change in syllable weight. Finally, pseudo reduplication was manifest in that the resultant reduplicative construction had no meaningful semantic and syntactic connection with either of the input daughters of the mother node when separately analyzed. The research revealed the applicability of the tenets of MDT on inputs in phonological copying and morphological doubling. This study suggests a further study to be carried out on: the morpho-phonological reduplication in coastal Bantu languages, a comparative study of pseudo reduplication of the Luhya dialects and the change in the supra segmental features that accompany phonological copying in other Luhya dialects | en_US |
