LAN

Postpositions –Ro and –Lan As Clitics In Kanuri (Published)

This paper examines the syntactic morphological functions of the postpositions –ro and –lan as clitics in Kanuri within the framework of descriptive linguistics adopting the works of zwicky and pullum (1983) and Spencer and Luis (2012) as theoretical framework. In conducting the research, primary sources of data collection was employed that is Kanuri written text: Sǝmonǝm wuro sarusǝgǝne and Nyariwa Kanuribe. These two texts are collection of stories written in Yerwa dialect of Kanuri. All the various places where the postpositional particles –ro and –lan occurred are identified and extracted for presentation and analysis. The outcome of the study reveals that the postpositions –ro and –lan function as clitics can be attached to both lexical and functional categories in Kanuri. Syntactically, it can be cliticized to nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, relativizers ‘dǝ’, dependent possessive pronoun ‘-nzǝ’ (his/her) and the genitive marker ‘-be’ to express different semantic functions.

Keywords: Clitics In Kanuri, LAN, Postpositions, Ro