Morphosyntactic Features of the Wəllo Variety of Amharic

Abstract

This paper is an attempt towards a morphosyntactic description of the Wəllo variety of Amharic. The description focuses on aspects of derivational and inflectional affixes, and on restructuring of phrases to serve as lexical expressions of manner of events and/or actions. The description of the facts show that the variety deviates from the ‘standard variety’ in the derivation of active, passive and middle voice stems of what are traditionally known as type A, B and C verbs. The variety geminates the penultimate radical of a root to derive both perfective and imperfective stems whereas the standard variety geminates the same radical to derive only perfective stems. Furthermore, the Wəllo variety uses different forms for passive and middle voices whereas the standard variety uses the same form for both the middle and the passive. Ditransitive verbs show agreement affixes for both the direct and indirect objects in the Wəllo variety whereas the same type of verbs show affixes for only direct object in the standard variety. The Wəllo variety also differs in the form and use of honorific, endearing and pleading terms, and in the choice of goal and source adpositions. The overall description shows that the Wəllo variety has a more complex morphology than the standard variety, which calls for a more elaborate comparative description.