Noun Phrase in Mesqan

Abstract

Mesqan is a South Ethio-Semitic tonguewhich is mainly worn in day-to-day message by a people of on 179,737 communities in the Gurage Zone, Ethiopia, whose linguistic skin were not well expressed. The inner aspire of this paper is to offer a complete account of noun phrase structures of the Mesqan tongue. The paper is expressive in character, as the lessons is mostly worried with telling what is really being in the tongue, and mostly relies on main linguistic facts. The linguistic facts, i.e. the elicited grammatical facts regarding noun phrases, was composed from local speakers of the tongue during 12 months of fieldwork mannered among 2011 and 2012 in four Mesqan villages and in Butajira, the managerial hub of the Mesqan Woreda. The head of a NP can be a pronoun, a noun or an adjective. The head alone can constitute a full noun phrase. Adjectives, nouns in the genitive, or relative clauses function as modifiers of head nouns. Quantifiers are numerals, unspecific quantifiers, determiners include the definite marker, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive suffixes occur in two positions to the head noun. Only the demonstrative pronouns and the number ‘one’ when used as indefinite marker occur in phrase-initial position, while all other determiners follow the head.