Dholuo

The Luo Nation is designed to help me learn about the history and culture of The Luos (Joluo); and to speak the Luo language, Dholuo (the mouth of Luos) in basic daily situations rapidly, effectively, and easily. This Conversational phrasebook has 31 topical lessons (accompanied by Audio, DVD), covering everything that I want toknow to understand and speak Dholuo. By reading this book, I will be able to introduce myself, get help in an emergency; shop; order in a restaurant; communicate in the office, talk about myself and family and even discuss literature, politics and public affairs.

Each topic in the book is written in the format of Conversational Phrases; followed by Vocabulary. For instance, the topic of greetings will have basic conversational phrases used in greetings, followed by the vocabulary in the greetings. I will not waste my time just learning vocabulary and grammar. If I am going to learn Dholuo, or any other language for that matter, I HAVE to speak it. The motto is “Listen, Repeat, and Speak Dholuo.”

This study is a morphosyntactic analysis of Dholuo verb system in Derivation by Phase Theory. The study sets out to attempt to account for various aspects of the Dholuo verb system in a probe-goal relationship and feature based syntax proposed in the adopted theory which has reduced major syntactic operations to two: Merge and agree. The study particularly focused on the relationship between tense, aspect, negation and the head verb. It also investigated case assignment, passive and antipassive constructions and the benefactive applicative in the Dholuo verb system in the proposed theoretical framework.
The research is qualitative in nature. The data for analysis is sentences in Dholuo collected from primary and secondary sources. The researcher’s knowledge in language analysis and intuition as a native speaker of Dholuo offered primary data as well.  Constant consultation with other native speakers was employed to avoid biases in data analysis.
The research findings show that Derivation by Phase theory cannot fully account for the linguistic variations of the Dholuo verb system without some modifications.  In the case of case assignment, the study found that the assignment of Nominative case as implied in the adopted theory could not account for such case assignment in Dholuo. This was because there was no tripartite agreement between the tense head, assumed to assigns a nominative case in the theory, the subject and verb. As a result, there was a difficulty in accounting for the subject pronoun and its case in Dholuo verb system in the adopted theoretical framework.  In addition, the findings were that the assumptions held in the methodological analysis of passive and antipassive constructions could not be applied fully in the analysis of the unique behavior of the object in passive and antipassive constructions in Dholuo sentences.
The overall conclusion of this research was that there was need for some significant modifications and changes to the methodological analysis and assumptions held in Derivation by Phase theory so as to fully account for both the agglutinative nature of Dholuo verb system as well as the unique nature of the arguments to the predicate.

Poka oyawo wengene. Piny nolil. Ne en odiewuor. Koko moro nochiewe e nindo. Nochiko ite. Nowinjo kwikwi mar min gi Aluor. Nenore wuon gi nogoye. Aluor nindo pok otere. Wuon gi, Ochwadi, osenindo. Poka nowinjo ka notwaro. Poka nonindo e kom man kar budho mar odno. Nyamin gi Atug nonindo bath odno. “Samoro en bende oneno?” Poka noparo. “Atug?” noluonge mos. Atug to noling thi.

This study is a morphosyntactic analysis of Dholuo verb system in Derivation by Phase Theory. The study sets out to attempt to account for various aspects of the Dholuo verb system in a probe-goal relationship and feature based syntax proposed in the adopted theory which has reduced major syntactic operations to two: Merge and agree. The study particularly focused on the relationship between tense, aspect, negation and the head verb. It also investigated case assignment, passive and antipassive constructions and the benefactive applicative in the Dholuo verb system in the proposed theoretical framework. The research is qualitative in nature. The data for analysis is sentences in Dholuo collected from primary and secondary sources. The researcher’s knowledge in language analysis and intuition as a native speaker of Dholuo offered primary data as well. Constant consultation with other native speakers was employed to avoid biases in data analysis. The research findings show that Derivation by Phase theory cannot fully account for the linguistic variations of the Dholuo verb system without some modifications. In the case of case assignment, the study found that the assignment of Nominative case as implied in the adopted theory could not account for such case assignment in Dholuo. This was because there was no tripartite agreement between the tense head, assumed to assigns a nominative case in the theory, the subject and verb. As a result, there was a difficulty in accounting for the subject pronoun and its case in Dholuo verb system in the adopted theoretical framework. In addition, the findings were that the assumptions held in the methodological analysis of passive and antipassive constructions could not be applied fully in the analysis of the unique behavior of the object in passive and antipassive constructions in Dholuo sentences. The overall conclusion of this research was that there was need for some significant modifications and changes to the methodological analysis and assumptions held in Derivation by Phase theory so as to fully account for both the agglutinative nature of Dholuo verb system as well as the unique nature of the arguments to the predicate.

According to Bošković’s (2008b) DP/NP parameter, a language which lacks definite articles does not make use of the D-layer and is an NP language. Additionally, Bošković (2008b, 2012) observes multiple structural and semantic differences in the traditional noun phrase (TNP) of languages with definite articles and those without them, leading him to posit multiple syntactic and semantic generalizations about DP and NP languages. However, for at least two of these generalizations (negative raising generalization and sequence of Tense generalization), article-less language Dholuo patterns like a DP language. I will argue, on the basis of Dholuo’s postnominal ordering of elements Dem, Num, A, that there is N-to-D movement (e.g. Carstens 2008) in the nominal domain of the language. Thus, I argue that Dholuo does make use of the D-layer, explaining why it patterns like a DP language.