Galen Sibanda

Morphophonology: Verbal Phonology and Morphology of Ndebele Galen Sibanda

Verbal Phonology and Morphology of Ndebele provides an in-depth study of some linguistically interesting aspects of verbal phonology and morphology of Ndebele, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe. While exposing the intricacy of Ndebele verbal morphophonology by looking closely at the verb structure and morphophonologically interesting aspects of morpheme concatenation, this work also highlights important theoretical issues that arise from such an exposition. Although the approach is mainly descriptive and the study carried out to a greater extent within Lexical Phonology, other theoretical frameworks such as Autosegmental Phonology, Underspecification, CV Phonology and the Moraic Theory are also exploited as the different types of data dealt with lend themselves to different types of analysis. This work is also an important step in linguistically documenting Ndebele and making readily available to linguists important language data in the form of examples.