The Linguistic Structure of Baraïn (Chadic)

This thesis is the first linguistic analysis of Baraïn [bva], an East Chadic (Afroasiatic) language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Republic of Chad. The study focuses on the fundamental phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures of the language. Baraïn has sixteen consonants (no implosives) and five vowels. It uses contrastive length and three levels of contrastive tone. No syllables are super-heavy. Morphophonological processes include asymmetrical patterns of voice spreading in consonant clusters and vowel backness harmony. Major class lexical items are minimally bimorphemic. Nouns are unbound roots with covert grammatical gender. However, gender is only distinguished in singular forms. Verbs are bound roots with an underlying tone melody. A small class of verb roots consist of a single consonant (and tone). Two classes of verbs have distinctive argument structures: labiles and causatives. Objects, indirect objects, and some oblique arguments can be indexed by verbal agreement, but not subjects. Six distinct tense, aspect, and mood categories are marked by suffixes and one auxiliary. There are ten categories in the pronominal and agreement systems, but the first person plural inclusive markers are all bimorphemic. The language is head-initial and the unmarked syntactic order is SVO. Question words are in situ. Negation is sentence-final. The appendices include a proposed orthographic system and seven interlinearized texts taken from recorded natural speech.