A MORPHOPHONOLOGICAL STUDY OF REDUPLICATION IN THE TERA LANGUAGE

Abstract

This paper is set to study the morpho-phonological analysis of some
Tera lexical items by analysing both full and partial reduplication in
Tera. The objective of the research is to account for the phonological
processes exhibited in the Tera reduplication patterns. It also
examines how reduplication operates in the Tera language within the
theoretical framework of Morphological Doubling Theory (MDT)
proposed by (Inkelas & Zoll, 2005). The model postulates that
reduplication targets morphological constituents of a word regardless
of their phonological size, confirming that, what is doubled in
reduplication is a morphological constituent either partially or totally.
The data for the study was collected through observations and
unstructured interviews with the native speakers of the Tera language
in order to establish how this phenomenon operates in the language.
The findings of the study showed that some phonological changes
occur in partial reduplication. In total reduplication complete root is
repeated, while in partial only some consonantal or vowel changes
occur in the base form. The study further revealed that reduplication
in Tera is both a class maintaining and class changing form of
derivation. By this, the study validated MDT’s assumption that for
any morphological reduplication there was always semantic
connotations that underlie the morphology of reduplication and
there are phonological modifications of the respective inputs that
accompanied phonological doubling. Therefore, it can be concluded
from the analysis that it is valid and evident to state that
morphological doubling theory can be used to account for
reduplicative patterns in the Tera language.