Aspects of Bura Phonology
Chapter One
PREAMBLE OF THE STUDY
The Bura people have a very rich sociolinguistic profile just like many African people. These include their system of government with the king as the head. The king is assisted by leaders of different units like farming and army, known as ‘Lawans’. Christianity, Islam and African Traditional Religion (ATR) are the religions practiced by Bura people. A rough estimate of the religious percentages is as follows: Muslim 78%, Christians 20%, Traditionalists 2%.
Traditionally, Bura people wear the normal Hausa attaire and carry sticks (especially those on mountain). The women are seen with skirts and wrapper which they tie on one side above the shoulder. Their hair is always cut short and covered with a calabash.
CHAPTER TWO
BASIC MORPHOLOGICAL CONCEPTS
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the basic concepts in morphology, it will however, begin by giving some introduction to the sound system of Bura Language.
Sound System of Bura Language Consonants in Bura Language
Bura language has 27 consonants, which are /p,b, t, d, k, g, kw, gw, f, v, θ, s, z, kp, h, tò, ò, з, l, r, w, j, m, n, dз, m, ŋ/
Language Vowels in Bura Language
Vowels are sounds produced with very little obstruction to the air passing through the vocal tract. Vowels may be described along the parameters of the part of the tongue used, the height of the tongue relative to roof of the lips.
Bura language has seven basic vowels which are /i, u, e, o, ε, É, a/ and four nasal vowels which are /ũ, ĩ, ã, É/ The chart of the vowels are shown below:
Morphological Concepts
The term morphology was coined in the nineteenth century in a biological context by a German poet, novelist and philosopher Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe. Its etymology is Greek: Morph means shape, form’ and morphology is the study of form of forms. In biology morphology refers to the study of the forms and structure of organisms, while in linguistics it refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure and how they are formed.
Scholars have given different definitions of morphology based on their view on the term.
Nida (1949: 54) defines morphology as the study of morphemes and their arrangements in the formation of words. Bloomfield (1933: 47) defines it as the study of constructions in which bound forms appear among constituents. Yusuf (1992: 82) on his own part, defines morphology as the branch of linguistics which studies the word formation rules of a language.
In all these definitions there are four basic things involved in morphology as a field of study.
- Formation: It deals with how words are formed i.e. from the sound (phoneme) to words. It studies the way sounds are put together to form
- Structure: It studies the internal structure of words i.e. what a word comprises
- Arrangement: It deals with the arrangement of words i.e. arranging of the word
- Rules: It deals with the set of rules governing the way words are formed in a language. Words are not just formed anyhow, there are some set of rules that a language follows in forming new
Morpheme
The basic concept of morphology is the morpheme. A major way in which morphologists investigate words, their internal structure and how they are formed is through the identification and study of morphemes. Trask (1996: 76) defines a morpheme as the minimal grammatical unit, the smallest unit which plays a part in morphology and which cannot be further broken down except in phonological terms. The morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that carries information about meaningful units of grammatical analysis. A morpheme cannot be further broken down or divided into smaller units without affecting the meaning. All morphemes in any construction must have a role to play in word formation e.g. when “s”
a plural morpheme is added to the word ‘cat’ it means that the cat is more than one.“I” in ífè turns the verb “fè” love to a noun ‘ífè’ ‘to love’.
CHAPTER THREE
MORPHOLOGY OF BURA LAGUAGE
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the morphology of Bura language. In this chapter, Bura morphemes will be discussed. This chapter also discusses the morphological typology of Bura language.
Morphology of Bura Language
As stated earlier in chapter two, morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in the formation of words. The basic concept of morphology is the morpheme. A morpheme as defined earlier is the minimal grammatical unit, the smallest meaningful unit that plays any part in the formation of words (morphology). There are two types of morphemes in Bura language. These are free and bound morphemes.
Free Morphemes in Bura Language
Free morphemes are morphological units which can stand in isolation. In Bura language, the free morpheme acts as a basic morpheme for the addition of another morpheme to form a new word in the language. The following are examples of free morpheme in Bura language.
CHAPTER FOUR
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the morphological processes in Bura language. Morphological processes are processes used by languages to form words. These processes include: affixation (prefixation, Infixation, suffixation), borrowing, blending, clipping, reduplication, compounding, calquing among others. New words are derived or formed through all these processes.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
This chapter gives the summary and conclusion of the work.
Summary
In this project, an attempt has been made to study the morphology of Bura (Pabir) language. The work has five chapters. In chapter one, the socio-linguistic profile, historical backgrounds, geographical location and the genetic classification of the language were discussed. Other areas covered were the scope and organization of study, theoretical framework and also the method of data collection and analysis.
Chapter two dealt with the phonology of Bura language, what morphology is, types of morphemes and some other morphological concepts. In chapter three, the morphology of Bura language was examined with free and bound morphemes discussed. The syntactic classes of the words in the language and morphological typology were also discussed.
Chapter four examined the various morphological processes attested in the language. They are affixation, borrowing, reduplication and compounding.
Conclusion
Based on this research, it was discovered that Bura is a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family group and is spoken in five local governments in Borno State of Nigeria. These are Hawul, Biu, Damatura, Shafa and Shanilocal governments.
This work cannot be said to have exhausted everything on the morphology of Bura language. However, it is our belief that the work will serve as a platform for further studies on the language, particularly in the areas of morpho-phonology, morpho-syntax, socio-linguistics and applied linguistics.
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