A Morphophonological Analysis of Imbrication in Kuria

Abstract

This paper describes imbrication in the Kuria language. This is a language that is spoken in Kenya and Tanzania. It has a robust agglutinative morphology that is largely regular except for verbs in the perfective tense whose forms undergo some changes resulting in an opaque form. This is the process of imbrication. Although some Bantu languages have forms that undergo imbrication, these are different in each language. The paper sets out to describe, with plenty of examples, how the regular perfective forms in Kuria undergo imbrication and the conditions necessary for imbrication to take place.  Key words: imbrication, perfective, base, root, minimality, regular, irregular