3 - Morphology

Summary

Hausa’s rich morphology employs prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, the latter with fixed tone melodies. Reduplication is very common. ‘Feminatives’ were created by adding a feminine suffix to words that were already feminine. Plural formation reflects consonant changes such as Klingenheben’s Law and the loss of final nasals. An ongoing drift has been the change of plural nouns into singulars. Similarly one has ‘frozen pluractionals’, i.e., erstwhile pluractionals without simple counterparts. The elaborate ‘grade system’ developed from basic verbs ending in /a/ or /i/ plus synchronically semantically empty CV suffixes and/or an adverb-like extensions such as totality and ventive. Different grades serve as transitivizers and intransitivizers. The ‘efferential’ grade manifests two originally distinct extensions, *-asi and *-da. Singular ethnonyms come from language names, the initial ba- being a reflex of the word ‘mouth’. The plural counterpart with -awa derives from a formative indicating ‘community’. Derivatives indicating agentive, locational, and instrumental are described including ‘pseudo-agentives’, i.e., words with agentive form but without agentive meaning.