Mood Marking in Dholuo

Abstract

This study is an attempt to analyze data from Dholuo for mood marking. Mood expresses the speaker’s attitude towards the contents of the sentence. The study specifically, tries to unravel the way in which the language investigated represents the phenomenum, that is, mood marking. It posits that the phenomenum is a major characteristic feature of morphosyntax of African languages, specifically the Nilo-Saharan group which Dholuo is a member. It is observed that Dholuo manifests morphosyntactic relations in which meanings are depicted from mood markers, suffixes on verbs and modal auxiliaries which are mostly derived lexical auxiliaries. This study is qualitative and descriptive in nature. It uses descriptive research design in which characteristics of variables being investigated are described in their natural settings. The data in this study are novel and come from the author who is a native speaker of Dholuo. The intuitive knowledge of the author was used to generate the data. From the investigation, it is shown that to great extent aspect is manifested in Dholuo.