Tonal Ezafe in Mombo

Abstract

Tones are used in Mombo to distinguish between both lexical and grammatical meanings. As in other Dogon languages Mombo they play a crucial role in the NP, where syntactic relations are coded through the word order accompanied by tonal changes in nouns, adjectives, and numerals, occurring at the left edge of NP. The paper aims to describe the tonal marking of the lexical head and its dependents in Mombo as a manifestation of a grammatical category similar to construct state in Semitic or ezafe in Turkic and West Iranian. Ezafe in Mombo expresses the fact that the head has a dependent of a certain type: a possessor, an adjective, a demonstrative. According to the type of dependent one can identify possessive, attributive, and demonstrative ezafe. These are considered as individual grammemes of ezafe category. Ezafe is assigned locally, i. e. within the same constituent that contains its controller (the dependent) and applies to constituents rather than to words. The analysis of constructions with two dependents, one of which is the possessor to the left of the head noun and the other is an adjective, a numeral or a demonstrative suggests that the ezafe is assigned in a special position.