Journal of Foreign Languages, Cultures & Civilizations

Coordination and Subordination in the Kenyang Language
Mbu Martha Njui

Abstract
Coordination and Subordination are common but important syntactic phenomena exhibited by natural languages. In investigating these phenomena, scholars have paid attention to its associated syntactic features such as the connecting devices, structural types, compression rules and constraining principles. Like many other languages, Kenyang employs two major strategies to conjoin phrases and clauses. These are the overt and the covert strategies. Talking about the overt strategy, the conjuncts of the coordinate structure are united by an overt morphological or phonological coordinating conjunction, while in the covert strategy the conjuncts are not united by any of such overt coordinating conjunction. Subordinate clauses in Kenyang on their part are marked by special subordinating morphemes which denote time, purpose, condition and concession. This paper describes the structure of both coordinating and subordinating phenomena in Kenyang (a Bantu Language spoken in the South West region of the republic of Cameroon). The structural approach is adopted in the data presentation to highlight on some cross- linguistic universals on coordination and subordination in order to properly characterize these linguistic features in Kenyang.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/jflcc.v3n1a2