Constituents Patterning And Thematic Roles Assignment In Dholuo Conditional Sentences

Constituents ordering, as a linguistic phenomenon, is largely underpinned by the word order typology. Languages from different families exhibit different word order typology in which the processes, participants, circumstances and attributes are patterned in given ways within their various categories of sentences. Dholuo, which belongs to the Western Nilo-Sahara family, is spoken not only in the Western part of Kenya by Joluo (the Luo) but also by the speakers of the language in other countries in parts of East Africa. The language has its unique configuration of constituents in its various categories of sentences which has not yet been conclusively studied. This paper sets out to describe, examine and explain the manifestation of constituent ordering and how the different constituents are assigned various thematic roles by the verbs. The theoretical framework for this paper is the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) while the research design adopted here is descriptive-analytic design. In this design it was possible to describe the constituent ordering and to examine thematic roles assignment. The data for this study was collected through elicitation using an elicitation frame administered on two native speakers of Dholuo from either gender. The data was then verified by the author using his native speaker competence. The data reveals that Dholuo has a unique constituent ordering pattern in which the modal auxiliary precedes the subject in declaratives and the past tense marker morpheme ne, precedes the subject and the main verb. And as is the case with all languages, verbs in Dholuo also assign different thematic roles to the different participants around them. The findings of this study generally make a contribution towards the deepening of the knowledge on Dholuo grammar and in particular, providing insight on constituents patterning in conditional sentences in Dholuo and the applicability and adequacy of SFG in the study of structure and meaning.