Impersonal Passive in Mesqan: a South Ethio-Semitic Language Spoken in Ethiopia

Abstract

Mesqan is a South Ethio-Semitic language which is predominantly used in day-to-day communication by a population of about 179,737 people in the Gurage Zone, whose linguistic features were not well described. The central aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive description and features of Impersonal constructions of the Mesqan language. The paper is descriptive in nature, since the study is mainly concerned with describing what is actually being in the language, and mainly relies on primary linguistic data. The linguistic data, i.e. the elicited grammatical data concerning Impersonal, was collected from native speakers of the language during 12 months of fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2012 in four Mesqan villages and in Butajira, the administrative center of the Mesqan Woreda. The Impersonal marker in Mesqan for perfective verbs is the non-segmental feature labialization plus palatalization, i.e ʷ/ʸ, which yields the labialization of the rightmost labializable consonant in a root and palatalization of the last root consonant. In addition, the Impersonal verb has to be marked by a heavy object agreement marker, which is most commonly the 3SG.M object marker -y. The changes in consonants in Impersonal construction can be categorized into labials alveo-palatals and post-palatals consonants in which they will appear everywhere or in the final position of a verb stem.