Dawro verb morphology and syntax - A description

Abstract

This Master’s thesis is a descriptive study of verb morphology and syntax in Dawro, an Omotic language spoken in Ethiopia. The data material was gathered during two fieldtrips to Ethiopia where I spent most of my time in the city of Hawassa interviewing native speakers of Dawro. An additional source of data was a translation of the New Testament into Dawro. I describe aspects of Dawro morphology in general and Dawro verb morphology and syntax in particular. The main contributions of the thesis are descriptions of previously undescribed morphology and the behaviour of verbs in dependent sentences and in clause-chains. Throughout the thesis, I am in critical engagement with the few previous works there are on the language, and I provide some novel remarks on the segmentation of finite verbs. The description is not exhaustive, but it does expand on the collected linguistic knowledge of Dawro. Underexplained features of the language still remain, and previously undescribed features of the language emerge.