Morphosyntactic Analysis of Fulfulde Voice and Tense in Adamawa Dialect: A Case Study of Yola South
Keywords:
Fulfulde Dialects, Language Change, Fulfulde Morphology, Voice and TenseAbstract
Voice is a relationship between subject and object with reference to verb in a sentence. Fulfulde verbs have three types of voices: active voice, middle voice and passive voice. The three voices also mark tenses such as past, present, habitual and future. In Fulfulde language, voices are attached with tenses and marked on verbs. This paper intends to look at the voice and tense affixes that are attached to verbs, with the aim to identify which affixes are frequently used, which are less frequently used and which are not used in today Adamawa dialect. The paper will then describe the productivity of these affixes and how some are lost over time, which is probably an evidence of ‘language change in progress’.
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