On affixation in Shupamem

Abstract

This paper describes the morphological process of affixation in Shupamem, an SVO and noun class systemic Grassfield Bantu language spoken in the West Region of Cameroon. Basically, affixation is a morphological process whereby affixes (prefix, infix or suffix) are attached to a word’s stem to form a new word or encode some grammatical properties. Based on a sample of corpus collected from native speakers of this language, the study identified two basic types of affixes which correspond to the two main types of bound morphemes: inflectional and derivational affixes. The formers occur most often with verbs to encode the infinitive mood (|jìn-|), tenses (|pé-|, |pí-|, |kàpí-|, etc.), and the iterative verbal aspect (|-kět|, |-ʃə̌|, and |-tə|). Concretely, jìndǎp “hit” is made up of the verbal stem |-lǎp-| to which the infinitive prefix |jìn-| is attached. Similarly, jìndǎpʃə̌ “hit repeatedly” is made up of the verbal stem |-lǎp-| to which the prefix |jìn-| (infinitive) and the suffix |-ʃə̌| (iterative aspect) are attached. On the other hand, Shupamem displays some derivational affixes used to create new words in the language. In effect, some nouns can be derived from other nouns, some qualifying adjectives from nouns, as well as some manner adverbs from qualifying adjectives using derivational affixes. This can be illustrated with the noun pín “dance” from which ŋgà:pín “dancer” is derived, and the adjective pý:két “bad” from which the adverb pýkérí “badly” is derived. In conclusion, this language provides some insightful data that contribute to the appraisal of affixation in Bantu language.