Formal characteristics

A sentence in Nizaa may contain up to 4 verbs in a row. We shall label this chained verbs, rather than verbal series. They appear as roots, and both strong-grade and weak-grade root-forms are found in chains. Lexical tone of the verbs¹² is usually, but not always retained.

Any derivations or inflections are attached to the last verb of the chain, with the notable exception of mh 'give', which often appear between the derivational and the inflectional suffix¹³.

A formal 'rough-draft' of a chain can be written thus:

V¹ …V⁴ (-DER^1…3)(-INFL^1…2).

If the last verb is mh, it will give:

V¹ …V³ (-DER^1…3) mh (-INFL^1…2).

It must also be noted that inflectional suffixes are not necessarily present in a clause. The verb(s) are often left as bare root forms, or with derivational suffixes only. The forms can in such cases be said to be perfective.

It is important to note that in the way we define concatenated verbs, no other words are allowed to appear between the verbs of a chain. If any other element is present, such as an object or locative phrase, it is not a chain in the sense we are assuming here. We also take the clitic ,qdÑ _verb detransitiviser’ to break up a chain if it occurs between two adjacent verbs.

12 Lexical tone of Nizaa verbs is either High or Non-high, according to Endresen 1992: 43, the verbs presenting a less complex tonology than the nouns.

13 Two other verbs possibly occurring in this position will also be discussed.

1) below exemplify this structure. The whole sentence contains 3 two-verb chains. The first clause is a main clause with a two-verb chain, the second clause is a single-verb clause with an embedded unmarked relative clause containing a two-verb chain, and the last clause is a modal clause with a chain as subordinate verb.

1) S^exp V¹ V² S^exp V¹ O^pat [ S^pat Øt v`∆`∆vt rd jdjhq`Å+ ¬tk√√∆œ rdvt la`»m jt∆t∆ e—æ—∆

œt v`∆`∆ ,vt rd jd ,jh ,q`Å ¬t k√√∆œ rd,vtá la`Ñm jt∆tæ e—æ—æ,K 3s grandchild-pl see know-TOT-PFdetr. they these see-past place grandpa staff-DF

V¹ V² ] V¹ NEG O^recp V¹ V^2-sub

…`f fdvtm`»+ xøæøævtæ,œv`á jt∆t∆ jo`æ`æœ mÕ v`∆-

…`f fd,vtá,m`∆ xøæøæ,vtá,œv` jt∆tæ jo`æœ mh,v`∆

fall go-past-pcpl will-stative-not grandpa talk give-sub

" His grandchildren have seen and know, they saw the place grandpa's staff went and fell into, they do not want to tell him."

s42:004

Several important features of the Nizaa chains are illustrated in 1). First that they occur both in main clauses and in embedded clauses, second that verbs with ,v`∆ ‘subordination marker’ or ,m`Ñ

‘participle marker’ can be augmented to a chain, and thirdly that chains occur in both intransitive and transitive clauses.

3.2 Frequencies

There are 128 clauses in the corpus containing more than one verb, including 15 chains used in constructions with a subjunctive verb, be it in the V¹ or the V^2-sub place, and 8 chains in periphrastic constructions.. The great majority, 109 instances, contain two verbs, 16 contain three verbs, while 3 contain four verbs in the same clause.

Some verbs are clearly more frequent than others in these constructions. We shall list the occurrence of verbs in different positions in 2-verb chains, in 3-verb chains and in 4-verb chains. The verbs are listed in order of frequency totally in chains, but in alphabetical order within each subgroup of equal frequencies.

The right most column shows use as a single verb in the corpus, this column is repeated throughout the tables for ready reference. The small size of the corpus will necessarily entail that some verbs cannot be shown to have independent use outside chains. In some cases I positively know that such use exists, such verbs are marked with E. In other cases I do not have any written or remembered material, these are marked with a *. The last group thus contains two possibilities: the verbs in it are not used independently outside chains, or I just have not happened to come across them.

Table 3-1 Two-verb chains

14 This verb is used once reduplicated with an intensifying of the meaning 'gather, come together'.

44 ¬tætæœ close.up (of mouth) 1 1 1 *

1 ihœ.iÿÿœ return; redo 28 9 1 8 *

The corpus contains 43 verbs occurring at least two times in chains and 53 occurring only once in chains. (In addition comes other verbs only used singly, they are not brought into the tables.)

The tables show that there is a group of verbs with a strong tendency of final position occurrence. They are among the most frequent verbs in chains. Another small group of high frequency has a tendency to occur in both final and non-final positions. The large group of verbs used only once in chains in this corpus, largely occurs in the first position. Another general tendency is that verbs that have a comparatively high frequency in first position also have a fairly high frequency of use in single-verb clauses.

The size of the corpus restricts the use of such numbers to a certain degree. However, there is enough material to provide some interesting leads in the further treatment of Nizaa verb-chains. We will in the following section look at the groups and their distribution pattern in chains. Since the 2-verb chains are by far the most numerous, we will start with them and then build on the patterns found within them to investigate 3-verb and 4-verb chains.