SOAS Research Online

Abstract

After the preface, table of contents and list of symbols, an introductory chapter gives details about the Jebero people and language, including an account of all previously published material, describes the circumstances and scope of this present study and summarizes some of the general characteristics of the language. The second chapter containing on explanation of the transcription used in the thesis is followed by an outline description of the phonology. The remainder of the thesis is a grammatical study of the verbal piece considered at different stages of grammatical analysis from the sentence to the morpheme. The function of the verbal piece is first given and this entails a description of the sentence-types found in the material examined since the function of the verbal piece is stated in terms of these sentence-types. The structure of the verbal piece is then taken up and this is set out in terms of the smaller elements of which the verbal piece may be said to be composed, namely the clause, phrase, and word, each of which is dealt with in turn. The Validity of the word as a grammatical element is shown and the basis for the establishment of word classes is described. A full description of each word class follows, giving details concerning stems, roots, and affixes of various classes and subclasses, In this way all the morphemes, words, and larger units which can enter into a verbal piece are classified as members of one or other system of grammatical elements. Some texts with translations are provided and for the first of these a full grammatical analysis is given. The thesis ends with two appendioes and a bibliography.