NEGATION IN MENKA

Authors

  • Gueche Hugues Carlos Fotso The University of Bamenda

Keywords:

Negation, Negation person marker, discontinuous morpheme, Grassfield, mood, tense

Abstract

This paper is concerned with negation in Menka, a little-documented language spoken in the North-west of Cameroon. The data was collected through interviews and analyzed in the structuralist framework (Saussure, 1913) The language under study exhibits very peculiar features as far as negation is concerned in the sense that it makes use of specific strategies to mark negation: we have termed them Negation 1 and Negation 2. Negation 1 is achieved with a discontinuous morpheme that exhibits a peculiarity specific to Menka: contrary to other Grassfield Bantu languages where the second particle does not change at all, the “negation person marker” varies with the personal pronoun.  “naka” is the marker for Negation 2. Both negations are, depending on the mood, interchangeable and mutually exclusive.

Published

28-02-2021

How to Cite

Fotso, G. . H. C. (2021). NEGATION IN MENKA. JOURNAL OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES, 4(2), 80–96. Retrieved from http://www.fajournaluba.com/index.php/jah/article/view/49

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 2 (2021)

Section

Articles
Copyright & Licensing

Copyright (c) 2021 Gueche Hugues Carlos Fotso

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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