Adventures in Tharaka: A report on ongoing work from our ESRC project on word and morpheme order
Room G32, 7 George Square
In this talk I will present recent results from two strands of recent work involving speakers of Kîîtharaka, a Bantu language spoken in Tharaka-Nithi county, Kenya. This language has two properties of interest for the study of typological universals. First, its noun phrase word order is N-Dem-Num-Adj, an order which in our terms is “non-homomorphic”. This means that the (linear) order fails to transparently reflect what is typically hypothesised to be the underlying hierarchical structure in the NP, namely [Dem [Num [Adj [ N ] ] ] ]. This is unusual: the majority of the world’s languages have homomorphic NP orders. The main focus of the project is to test whether learners are biased in favour of homomorphic orders, therefore Kîîtharaka speakers are a prime test population. We will discuss the work we’ve done so far investigating homomorphism, and what we’ve just gotten start in Tharaka. The second properties of interest is that Kîîtharaka, like other Bantu languages, is predominantly prefixing (i.e. morphological affixes precede the stem). This is again in contrast to the majority of languages, which are primarily or exclusively suffixing. We report the results of an experiment testing whether Kîîtharaka speakers show the same suffixing preference that has been claimed on the basis of experimental data from English-speaking participants.