Focusing on the Ateso language, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of tense and aspect, exploring their interrelation with tone within the Eastern Nilotic language family. It investigates tense and aspect marking, their distribution, and their occurrence in basic sentence structures. Additionally, it assesses the applicability of the Checking theory from the Minimalist program to Ateso's morphological forms. The book serves as a valuable resource for linguists, facilitating comparisons between Ateso and other mutually intelligible Nilotic languages.
This book offers a comprehensive description of Ateso, an Eastern Nilotic language, focusing on its phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ateso's phonological structure is characterized by vowel alternation strategies governed by three harmony rules: root-control, feature-control, and mid-vowel assimilation. Unlike other Eastern Nilotic languages that have lost the vowel */ä/, Ateso retains it phonetically. The noun morphology includes inflectional affixes for gender and number, utilizing prefixes for gender and suffixes for number and word derivation. Ateso's verbal morphology features inflected verb forms that mark categories such as person, number, tense, aspect, and mood, either segmentally or supra-segmentally. Tense is indicated by tone on the verb root, while other morphemes denote person, number, aspect, and mood. The discussion includes verbal derivations and extensions, such as causatives and passives. Syntactically, Ateso is a VS/VO language, allowing clauses comprised solely of an inflected verb or an inflected verb followed by one or two noun phrases or a noun phrase and a pronoun. The language also employs coordination, subordination, and clause chaining in its sentence structures. The author, David Barasa, holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town and has expertise in various linguistic fields, including language documentation and multilingualism.
