Structure of Verb Phrase in Mesqan: A South Ethio-Semitic Language Spoken in Ethiopia

Abstract

Mesqan is a South Ethio-Semitic Language which is mainly used 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 Verb phrase structures of the Mesqan Language. 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. Two morphologically distinct verb groups are found: simple verbs and compound verbs. A simple verb contains a minimum of three morphemes: (i) a consonantal root is encoding the semantics of the verb; (ii) a vowel pattern (i.e. a template) encodes its aspect or mood; and (iii) subject agreement markers. Perfective, imperfective, and jussive/imperative are the three main conjugations for each verb, which are differentiated through various templates, whose actual forms depend on the verb type to which a consonantal root belongs, and distinct sets of subject agreement markers. In addition, some subject agreement markers of subordinate and negative imperfective verbs differ from those used with imperfective verbs in affirmative main clauses.