Everlyn Oluoch

A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Mood in Dholuo; the Minimalist Program Everlyn Oluoch

This study is a morphosyntactic analysis of mood in Dholuo. It examines the content of the Verb phrase (VP) and role of tone in Dholuo mood constructions. The study sets out to find out how Dholuo mood is expressed, the modal structure and how it is affected by feature checking under Chomsky?s minimalist program (1995). The operations in the computational system are driven by morphological and lexical necessity. The study concludes that this theory accounts for the features present in the Dholuo mood system with modifications to cater for the feature checking of Dholuo mood in the creation of a head for mood and aspectual tone for the auxiliary that derives from a noun, or tonal distinction where an auxiliary is used together with the verb from which it derives. This is in line with the idea that the minimalist program is based on feature checking and structure building; both processes are morphologically or lexically driven. The features build the structure. Morphemes are moved out of the lexicon to build the structure. The work is useful to professionals in linguistics, students or anyone interested in the study of the Dholuo language and in the advancement of Minimalist theory.