A MORPHO-PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF DIMINUTIVES IN EKEGUSII LANGUAGE KISII, KENYA

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to analyse the formation and interpretation of diminutives in Ekegusii language using a morpho-pragmatic approach.Ekegusii is a Bantu language with distinct segmental morphemes. Diminutives fall under the domain of evaluative morphologyDi Garbo(2013).Ekegusii language has prefixes attached onto nouns plus a set of prefixes on the determiners, verbs, adjectives, pronominals and all words associated with nouns. The language group that was purposively sampled and studied using a descriptive research design, for instance, is classified as an agglutinating language.It was expected that distinct morphemes making up the words could easily be identified and the meanings associated with the diminutive affixes examined in order to avoid communication breakdown, if the correct interpretation of the word forms according to context, would not be provided.