GĨKŨYŨ VERBAL EXTENSIONS: A MINIMALIST ANALYSIS

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Gĩkũyũ verbal extensions: their individual occurrence and their co-occurrences. Gĩkũyũ, just like other Bantu languages, has a rich and complex morphology. The complexity is more evident in derivational morphology than inflectional morphology. A feature that makes derivational morphology complex is the concatenations of the derivational affixes such as the verbal extensions under investigation in this study. The five affixes, namely the causative, the applicative, the passive, the reciprocal and the reversive were described and analysed individually and then they were concatenated. The individual occurrences and the co-occurrences were then analysed using the Minimalist Program, the theoretical framework used in the study. The theory has been revised extensively but it is the 1995 version that showed a higher degree of explanatory adequacy in analysing Gĩkũyũ verbal extensions. The data for the study was in form of four hundred verbs. The verbs were then classified according to their transitivity status.