Typological Profile of Constituent Orders in the Shabo Grammar

Abstract

The paper discusses the linguistic profile of Shabo’s morphemes, words and phrases based on the position of the head and the dependent unit. The purpose of profiling Shabo is to present a typological description of the language so that comparativists can access what Shabo constitutes in terms of genetic, typological, and areal grammatical features. The 48 sets of data for the study came from Teferra (1991, n = 20) and the linguistic field notes of Aklilu Y. and the author (n = 28) and the data described in line with the typology models (Croft, 1990; Greenberg, 1966; Heine 1976) focusing on language type, word order typology, and harmony features.[1] As a result, Shabo is profiled as having an SOV word order. It is a pro-drop (null overt pronoun) language. Moreover, Shabo is profiled as a synthetic, fusional, and complex-mixed relational language type. In terms of harmony features Shabo manifests harmony (1) correlates but with five disharmonic ones.

Keywords: Shabo, typology, profile, word order, language type, harmony