Typology and Syntactical Description of Daju Language

Abstract

The study was based on the typological components and syntactic description of the Daju language in the area of Lagawa in South Kordofan State, which far about 135km west of kadugli. The language is spoken by about 2100 people. The study adopts generative grammar, as the model of analysis of the Daju grammar, which is one of the most updated formalisms employed in the study of the structure of languages. Also it follows the methods of Leipzig glossing rules, in which the first line is from the object language, the second line, i.e. the glossing, represents the root words and any overt/null affixes attached to them. The third line is the translation in English.Thus study formulated the sentence and its constituent structure intosyntactic category, substitution classes, the functional and 'subject and predicate'. Such analysis will reveal what types of elements that function as complement, specifying and adjuncts within any particular phrase type that Daju language offer. The study also focused on the inflection categories that correspond to nouns such as, marking, and those corresponding to verbs such as agreements, thusthe composition of the sentence in Daju comes out that the word order is SVO, head of the phrase comes first; the noun precedes the adjective, the number comes last, adverbs comes after the verb, and demonstrative comes after the noun; thereforeDaju pronouns system is similar to the English pronouns system, but Daju first person plural has implicit and explicit. Also Daju language has no gender.