7.6 Problems

This problem concerns Lingala verbs. Each of the verbs in the lists below has three morphemes: a root; a morpheme indicating the person and number of the subject ('I', 'you:SINGULAR', 'he/she', 'we', 'you:PLURAL'); and a morpheme indicating some aspect of the time, the likelihood, or the desirability of the state or event. I'll refer to these three categories of morphemes as root, subject, and tense-aspect-modality (TAM). The following values of TAM appear in the lists below (you don't need to bother with what they actually mean): SIMPLE PRESENT (SIMP PRES) PRESENT PERFECT (PRES PERF), FUTURE (FUT), SUBJUNCTIVE (SUBJ).

Tone, marked by the presence (high tone) or absence (low tone) of an accent mark on vowels, is important in the lexicon and the grammar of this language; don't ignore it! To write accent marks, you can put them after the vowels. Don't type accented characters in your word processing program, then save them as text and upload them to Annotate; they won't show up in Annotate. If you want accented characters to display in Annotate, you have to use the HTML codes for the characters. If you know these, feel free to use them.

In the first list of verbs, all are in the SIMPLE PRESENT form. You just need to figure out what the subject morphemes are and where they come in the words.

1. Where in the words does the subject morpheme appear?
2. What are the morphemes for the following subjects?
   1. 'I'
   2. 'you:SINGULAR'
   3. 'he/she'
   4. 'we'
   5. 'you:PLURAL'

The following list includes verbs in different TAM forms. (Only forms with subjects 'I', 'you:SINGULAR', and 'he/she' are included; the other subject morphemes behave similarly.) You need to figure out what the verb roots and the TAM morphemes are. (Also refer to the words in the first list.)

3. What are the root morphemes with the following meanings?
   1. write
   2. arrive
   3. look
   4. agree
   5. speak
   6. buy
   7. change
   8. drive
   9. tell
   10. divide
   11. wipe
   12. be surprised
4. What are the following TAM morphemes?
   1. SIMPLE PRESENT
   2. FUTURE
   3. SUBJUNCTIVE
   4. PRESENT PERFECT
5. Given what you know about Lingala verb morphology, how would you say the following?
   1. look + you:PLUR + FUT
   2. wipe + we + SUBJ
   3. plead + I + PRES PERF