The Acquisition of Nairobi Swahili:

the Morphosyntax of Inflectional Prefixes and Subjects

The dissertation is based on longitudinal data that I collected in naturalistic settings in Nairobi, Kenya between December 1999 and November 2000. The subjects were four children aged between 1;10 and 3;1. I recorded their utterances twice a month for varying lengths of time and over varying durations, transcribed the utterances in CHAT format and analyzed the transcripts using CLAN programs (MacWhinney, 2000). Read more about the data collection by clicking here.

My dissertation committee was comprised of Nina Hyams (chair and advisor), Carson Schütze, Dominique Sportiche, Thomas Hinnebusch, and Alison Bailey.

Click here for:

• Entire dissertation (1,526K)
• Preliminary pages (TOC, list of tables/figures. acknowledgments, abstract) - 27K
• Chapter 1 (Introduction) - 50K
• Chapter 2 (The morphosyntax of adult Nairobi Swahili) - 177K
• Chapter 3 (Methodology) - 38K
• Appendix 3A (Adult Similarities) - 11K
• Appendix 3B (Codes used in Transcription) - 14K
• Appendix 3C (Staging Data for each Child) - 28K
  
• Chapter 4 (Omission of Prefixes) - 119K
• Appendix 4A (Missing Mood examples) - 6K
• Appendix 4B (Root Infinitives) - 9K
• Appendix 4C (Omissions by month) - 12K
• Appendix 4D (Subjunctives) - 17K
  
• Chapter 5 (Subject Omission and [-SA] Clauses) - 121K

• References (182 total references) - 31K

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