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Phonology |
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stem
as well as a word. Form like   óá
‘brothers’ is also a word in Lotha consisted of a stem and
suffix i.e. ó-á.
Form like f rò
ciá
‘dogs’ or ‘those dogs’ is a phrase consisting of two words
i.e. frò
and c á.
frò
is a stem as well as a word. cá
is a word consisting of a stem c
‘the or that’ and plural suffix á.
Therefore, in Lotha, morphologically a word may consist
of only one stem or more than one in which case it may be
followed or prefixed by some affixes, but affixes alone
do not constitute a word. In the examples like frò
cá
‘those dogs’ frò
sáá
‘these dogs’ c
and sá
are free forms as they can occur freely as in the following
examples.
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1.  -n
sá
chktà
I-nom this like |
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or |
I like this |
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sá
-n
chkt
this I-nom like
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2. -n
c
chktà
that I-nom
like |
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or |
I like that |
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c
-n
chktà
that I-nom like
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Word
classes in Lotha : |
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Word classes in Lotha are established on the basis of morphological
and/or syntactic grounds. Stem classes in Lotha can be divided
into different groups on the basis of the inflectional endings.
Forms which show identical inflectional behavior can be
called as form class. Accordingly, Lotha words are divided
into following groups, 1) Nouns 2) Pronouns 3) Adjectives
4) Verbs 5) Adverbs 6) Conjunctions. 7) Postpositions. Out
of the above word classes, nouns, pronouns and verbs are
established on the morphological grounds and rest of the
word classes on the syntactic grounds. Above mentioned word
classes are also broadly grouped into two categories on
the basis whether
they are declinable and rest are indeclinable. Morphological
processes found in Lotha are purification, suffixation,
reduplication and compounding. Morphophonemic changes
that take place with the alternant of morphemes (i.e.
a morpheme is a minimum meaningful unit equivalent to
a stem in Lotha) when they occur with various kinds of
suffixes are listed in Chapter 2 on ‘Morphophonemic’.
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Definition of a noun: |
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A noun in Lotha is defined on the morphological and/or syntactic
grounds as follows : |
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1. Any stem that can take a number marker, |
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NOTE
1. Stems referring to Kinship take the plural marker directly,
if stems are qualified by the modifiers, number marker
is added to the modifier (or to the noun phrase) and not
to the noun. (For details please see 3.7)
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NOTE 2. Since number markers are added to the modifiers
(or to the noun phrase) adjectives, quantifiers and such
other modifiers may take a plural marker, on this count,
they may not be considered as nouns. (For details pl. see
3.7) |
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2. Any stem that can take gender word or marker (Note that
only animate nouns take the gender word or a marker. For
details pl. see 3.5). |
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3. Any stem that can take a case marker or other post positions. |
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NOTE 1. that postpositions also take case markers but they
are not nouns as they always occur after the nouns and never
occur independently. |
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NOTE
2. Morphological grounds listed in 1,2 and 3 are also
applicable to pronouns. |
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