Word Formation of Dawro, South West Ethiopia

Abstract This study attempted to describe and analyze the derivational morphology of Dawro, an Omotic language that belongs to the North Ometo cluster (Fleming, 1976) in Southern Nation Nationalities and People Regional State. The study examines the word formation processes involved in the derivation of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and compounding and reduplication. To that end the researcher used descriptive research type through qualitative approaches used to collect and analyses the data. Consequently, primary data on word formation processes was collected through unstructured linguistic data elicitation tool to the selected six key informants. The study, investigated the processes of nominalization, including the derivation of manner, abstract, action and result nominal derivations. Regarding derivation of verbs, the study presents the derivation of causative, passives and reciprocals. In the formation of adjectival, the study analyses adjectives formed from different derivational suffixes, such as -ttiya, -ma, -a, -o, -e, -iya and -anča. The study also discussed the processes of compounding, the formation of compound nouns and compound adjectives. Concerning the process of reduplication, the study examined that the formation of reduplication of the adverbs and nouns that refer to time. Besides, the phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic features of the derivatives and compounds are considered in this study. For all kinds of word formation, rules have been provided.