Sidaama (Sidaamu Afoo)
Anbessa Teferra
Tel Aviv University
This book presents a descriptive grammatical sketch of Sidaama, a Highland East Cushitic language spoken in south-central Ethiopia. It deals with phonology, lexical categories, phrasal categories, and sentence structure of the language.
The introduction deals with classification of Sidaama, geographical and cultural information, present status of the language and a review of previous studies. The second chapter is devoted to phonology and covers segmental phonemes, syllable structure, consonant sequences, stress and major phonological processes such as epenthesis, metathesis and various assimilatory processes. The third chapter covers lexical categories. The major lexical categories are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The minor ones are conjunctions and postpositions. This is followed by morphological processes such as inflection, derivation and compounding.
In the fourth chapter simple and complex phrasal categories are discussed. The phrasal categories are noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverbial phrase and postpositional phrase. Furthermore complements selected by phrases and specifiers which accompany them are treated.
The fifth chapter deals with sentence structure. The first portion covers the structure of simple sentences while the second portion deals with complex sentence types. At the end of the book two short texts are included.
ISBN 9783862885701. Languages of the World/Materials 501. 116pp. 2014.
