Morphological Analyzer for Great Andamanese Verbs: Implementing a Concatenative Template
Narayan Kumar Choudhary, Anvita Abbi, Girish Nath Jha · 2007
This paper presents an account of the verb phrase morphology of Great Andamanese, an endangered language of the Andaman Islands. The paper is based on the research work done in the Andaman Islands among the people of the endangered tribe. The verb phrase in Great Andamanese takes as constituents the morphemes carrying the content of causatives, subject and object clitic, negative, prohibitive negative, class marking consonant or thematic consonant (Abbi 2003, 2006) and TAM markings. All of these features are affixed to the verb root or lexeme -the only obligatory element in the verb phrase. An illustrative schema to the Great Andamanese verb phrase can be given like the followingCAUS-SBJ.CL-OBJ.CL-REFL-CAUS/NEG∆VR/VL≈NEG-CLSM-TAM The schema works on constraints at the affixal level which include order, optionality and obligatoriness. The morphophonemic rules such as epenthesis, vowel deletion, assimilation that operate in the varying forms of verb phrase are not discussed here.