| The proposed project is an expansion and continuation of ongoingresearch on endangered Omotic languages of Ethiopia (Dime andZargulla) financed by the first round of NWO's Endangered LanguagesProgramme. It will include both a thorough documentation of oneendangered Omotic language, Sheko, and a typological-comparativestudy of the distinction between declarative (statement-like)sentences and interrogatives (questions) within the Omotic languagefamily. Interesting findings made during the study of the Dime andZargulla languages motivate the project. Notably, in Zargulla onecommon way of forming an interrogative sentence is dropping the focusmarker, which is obligatory in declarative sentences. Otherwise theinterrogative and declarative clauses are identical in theirconstituent structure and intonation. (A similar case is reported foranother east-Ometo language, Zayse in Hayward 1990. However detailson the intonational differences and similarities betweeninterrogative and declarative clauses still needs to be done). InDime, a similar phenomenon is observed. In this language, theinterrogative is formally different from the declarative only by theabsence of subject agreement markers in interrogative clauses whereasthese are obligatory in Declarative clauses. Another system of modality-marking - typologically rare - is observedamong the North-Ometo languages of Omotic. In these languages, thedistinction between declaratives and interrogatives (of both polarand content-question-word types) is obligatorily marked on the verbthrough the use of different sets of morphemes which vary accordingto the person, number and gender of the subject. In this system, aswell as in the reductive morphology system observed in Dime andZargulla, there is no morpheme/particle that specifically designatesquestions and/or statements. The research team sets out toinvestigate the inter-categorial dependence, i.e., the use of thepresence or absence of other independently motivated categories,namely of focus and agreement morphemes, to signal the distinctionamong members of other paradigms, i.e. the distinction betweendeclaratives and interrogatives. We plan to examine details of theseunusual phenomena in all branches of the Omotic language family andto explore their theoretical relevance to discussions in generallinguistics, particularly on universals and variation in languages. Omotic as a whole represents close to thirty minority languages mostof which have not been documented. Since it is not possible todocument each and every language of this family at the moment, weintend to combine a thorough study of a representative language,Sheko, from the least-studied branch of Omotic (from the so-calledDizoid group) with a typological comparative study onmorpho-syntactic strategies of interrogative and declarative moodmarking in Omotic. The study on Sheko will be important both for thepreservation of the language and as input for the proposedtypological comparison. The ongoing project on the Dime and Zargullalanguages was designed in such a way that there will be twopublications with the grammars of these two languages. Now, as theproject progresses, some interesting similarities between the twolanguages emerge, e.g. the interrogative-declarative clause |
