Browsing by Author "Gitonga, Jackline"

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    The Syntactic Structure of the Prepositional Phrase in Kiigembe: A Minimalist Perspective
    (Kenyatta University, 2022-11) Gitonga, Jackline
    This study focuse: 7 Kifgembey diale cts 2?. tt}:es};\l}[?gml structure otj the Prgpositional Phrase (PP) in t!le Program. It had three objectives Fflnguage with guidance from the Minimalist in Kiigembe. Secondly, to ide. t'lm, to descnbe.: the syntactic structure of the PP sentences and finally u’) detern;l' ify the semantic Toles of the PP in Kiigembe ascotinted For us; b ctermine whether the Kiigembe PP can be adequately d for using the Minimalist Program. We che he PP for thi h because it has not been the focus of - We shose. the FR.for L3 [5520ey Kiigembe dial s of many studies. Further, the choice of the SIE lialect stemmed from the fact that it has largely been ignored because it is not the dialect used in documented Lo 1BRCY on only the PP. In addit sources. In terms of scope, this study focused 4 *. In addition, the focus was only on the semantic roles and not the syntactic functions of the PP. The Minimalist Program guided this study. Its choice was based on the assumption that it is a universal theory, and therefore, it can 30001}111 for the grammars of all languages. The study was carried out in Kangeta location of Igembe Central constituency, Meru County, where the target dialect is dominant. The purposive sampling method was used to select a sample of ten re.spondem.s who included five female and five male speakers of the Kilgembe dialect. This study employed a descriptive research design. The data needed for this study was Kiigembe sentences from which PPs were extracted and analysed according to their structures. For each distinct structure, a Minimalist tree diagram was drawn for analysis. The data was collected using the informal conversational _recorder aided in capturing the data. In terms of structure, we omposed of a preposition, the head, and a ts take the complement position of the PP. These include the NP and PP and AdvP. We also observed that the PP in Kiigembe plays various semantic roles; locative, temporal, agent, source, direction, accompaniment and instrument. Finally, we found out that the PP in Kiigembe can be accounted for using the Minimalist program. Besides contributing to the studies carried out in the Kimeru in general, this study may also offer insights to scholars of dialectal studies to carry out a comparative analysis of Kiigembe and another the research findings are expected to variety of the Kimeru language. Moreover, r te enhance scholarly understanding of the structure of the Kimeru Prepositional phrase, and therefore, be a resourceful reference point for other related linguistic studies in phrasal syntax.