Morphological Processes

This chapter describes Etulo as fundamentally isolating/analytic but with limited, yet significant agglutinative features. It explores word-formation via three major strategies: affixation, reduplication, and compounding. Among productive affixation, the nominalising prefix o- plays a key role: it forms infinitives and gerundive nominals from verbs and ideophones. There is also a verbal suffix –lu derived from the motion verb lúū ‘go’. Etulo makes systematic use of reduplication (in gerundive nominal formation, ideophones, and alongside phonological and affixal changes) and compounding, both in nouns and verbs. Compounds include genitive nominal compounds which differ from associative constructions by disallowing the associative particle and verb compounds, some of which may be lexicalized serial verbs distinct from standard serial verb constructions. The morphological make up of Etulo thus falls closer to the analytic end of the typological spectrum, with selective affixation and strong reliance on compounding and reduplication.