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Typology of Luganda verbal and nominal affixes

by Medadi Erisa Ssentanda

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Introduction

This article explores affixation in Luganda. Bantu languages, Austronesian and Austroasiatic are known to be agglutinative. Agglutination is associated with prefixation, suffixation, circumfixation and infixation.

Luganda: Overview

Luganda is a Bantu language, a subgroup of the Benue – Congo of the Niger – Congo language family which is spoken in central and southern Uganda. Luganda is rich in agglutinating morphology. Agglutinating languages have words which contain several morphemes but these words can be broken into morphological units that correspond to a grammatical unit (O’Grdy, Dobrovolsky and Katamba 1996:381). The morphological units can either be prefixes, suffixes, infixes and circumfixes. Luganda has such complex morphology including prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes.

Verbal affixes

A Luganda verb is agglutinable for person, number, tense, aspect, mood. Some scholars argue that a Luganda verb is also agglutinable for case and gender (Kiingi 2005).