Morphological Rule in the Samoan Language

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Samoan language can said to be a deleting or a separating language. It uses various supplementary morphemes in tenses and sentence constructions. For example, to denote present continuous tense  oloo is used.

Although Samoan language uses the isolation rule, the morphological process of reduplication is also used to repeat whole or section of a word. This is where the accented form of a verb root is used to specify a plural number. For instance, in singular to be sick is mai and in plural the word is repeated to form the plural form to be mamai. The first part of the word ma is repeated to form mamai. The word formed contains an identical ma as a prefix or a modifier, which is identical to the main stem of the word mai. When ma is repeated and forms the word mamai the word is an imitative word or a reduplicate, which makes the word to be somehow informal. Generally, it forms a linguistic form of prototype that is inclusive and connected together with prearranged lexeme.

The punctuation is limited to the use of the comma. However, there are many words that do not use the comma. The Samoan language uses the Verb Subject Order agreement, for sentence pattern structure, unlike English which use the Subject Verb Order.

The main morphological rule for Samoan depends on the combination of several morphemes. Traditionally, the morphological rule dictates how the Morphemes should be combined to bring a grammatically correct word or sentence pattern.

Take for example, the morphological rule for word-formation in English language uses prefix and suffix. The suffix fy when inserted to words such as terror, person, test, simple and pure, it forms terrify, personify, testify, simplify, and purify respectively. In addition, -able when suffixed, it forms adjectives with various verbs which retain both sense of the verbs suffixed and the true meaning of the suffix able, i.e., breakable, believable, workable, and attainable to mean something is able to be done. Therefore, the morphological rule for such derived words from suffixes will be: Verb + suffix able = able to be done e.g., believe + able= able to be believed. When using the prefix the same combination of morphemes is applied. For instance, an is a morpheme with the meaning of not. It can be successfully prefixed with adjectives to form words in the negative form. The rule is un + Adjective = not + adjective for example the word uneasy was formed when un + easy (adjective) = not easy.

The following example of words use reduplication rule to form words. For example, manao = he wishes inclusive with the pronoun he becomes mananao = they wish. Notably mana has been reduplicated to form the plural form they wish. In Samoan they is o t Idtou but the reduplication rule uses the main stem of word nao and ma to form the reduplicate mananao.

The words Samoan illustrations:

  • matua = he is old in plural it becomes matutua = they are old (matu + tua),
  • malosi = he is strong in plural it becomes malolosi = they are strong (malo + losi), punou = he bends in plural it becomes punonou = they bend (puno + nou),
  • atamaki = he is wise in plural it becomes atamamaki = they are wise (atama + maki).

Therefore, the Samoan for:

  • Plural form they weave is lalaga (la + laga),
  • Plural form they travel is savavali (sava+ vali),
  • Singular form he sings is pese deleted from the plural form pepese.

Hence, the pronoun morphemes la, sava, and pepe are reduplicated from the mains stem of the singular forms laga, vali and pese. The morphological rule evident is pronoun + Verb = reduplicate. It is important to note how the singular verb is selected, cut and then reduplicated. For example, matua in singular becomes matutua in plural. matu is cut and reduplicate tu to form matutua  (ma + tu + tua). Thus, the rule shows, pronoun + morpheme + Verb.

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