Noun Phrase in Mesqan

Mesqan is a South Ethio-Semitic tonguewhich is mainly worn in day-to-day message by a people of on 179,737 communities in the Gurage Zone, Ethiopia, whose linguistic skin were not well expressed. The inner aspire of this paper is to offer a complete account of noun phrase structures of the Mesqan tongue. The paper is expressive in character, as the lessons is mostly worried with telling what is really being in the tongue, and mostly relies on main linguistic facts. The linguistic facts, i.e. the elicited grammatical facts regarding noun phrases, was composed from local speakers of the tongue during 12 months of fieldwork mannered among 2011 and 2012 in four Mesqan villages and in Butajira, the managerial hub of the Mesqan Woreda. The head of a NP can be a pronoun, a noun or an adjective. The head alone can constitute a full noun phrase. Adjectives, nouns in the genitive, or relative clauses function as modifiers of head nouns. Quantifiers are numerals, unspecific quantifiers, determiners include the definite marker, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive suffixes occur in two positions to the head noun. Only the demonstrative pronouns and the number ‘one’ when used as indefinite marker occur in phrase-initial position, while all other determiners follow the head.

Mesqan is spoken by about 200,000 people who mainly reside in the Gurage Zone, particularly in the Mesqan Woreda and the nearby Butajira town, which is also their administrative center (cf. Getu, 2012:13-14). Islam is the dominating religion, which also shapes the live style and culture of the Mesqan. Mesqan is easily understood by speakers of other Gunnä n Gurage varieties (Fekede, 2015:194-198). Most Mesqan are bilingual in Amharic, the official language in the Gurage Zone (Getu, 2012:74). Despite few literary pieces in Ajä mi or Fidä l (Wagner, 1983:363;Hetzron, 1968:156 fn. 4), Mesqan is not used for writing.

Research methodology
The study is qualitative and empirical in nature, and mainly relies on primary linguistic data. Since the researcher is not a speaker of Mesqan, native speakers of the language were consulted. The data were gathered from seven native speakers of Mesqan during 12 months of fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2012 in Butajira, MisraqImbor, MirabImbor, MisraqMesqan and MirabMesqan. ① During my fieldwork, I had five male and two female language consultants whose first native language was Mesqan and who had a good knowledge of Amharic. They all were born within the speech community of Mesqan where they also obtained their primary and secondary school education. Besides their native language and Amharic, they speak English. During my fieldwork, I spent most of my time in Butajira which is the administrative center of the Mesqan Woreda, but I also undertook several shorter trips to MisraqImbor, MirabImbor, MisraqMesqan and MirabMesqan. I started my fieldwork by eliciting words and sentences. Next, I recorded free speech texts thendatas were transcribed, edited and translated. The presentation of the data is not based on a single linguistic model or theory, but is intentionally eclectic descriptive. I used a structural approach for identifying phonemes and morphemes. Morpho-syntactic phenomena were described on the basis of major findings in linguistics typology. Based on The Leipzig Glossing Rules, most of the data are presented in an interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme version with four lines. The first line represents the actual utterance. The second line contains underlying or hypothetical morphemes or morpheme combinations which are glossed in the third line; the fourth line is an English translation usually in a literary style.

Structure of the noun phrase
The basic structure (word order) of the noun phrase in Mesqan is:

demonstrative -quantifier -modifier -HEAD -determiner
The head of a NP can be a pronoun, a noun or an adjective. The head alone can constitute a full noun phrase. Adjectives, nouns in the genitive, or relative clauses function as modifiers of head nouns. Quantifiers are numerals, unspecific quantifiers, determiners include the definite marker, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive suffixes occur in two positions to the head noun. Only the demonstrative pronouns and the number 'one' when used as indefinite marker occur in phrase-initial position, while all other determiners follow the head.
A demonstrative alone can function as head of a noun phrase, when it is used in its ① The Mesqan people consider the area containing MisraqImbor, MirabImbor, MisraqMesqan and MirabMesqan as their original place.
pronominal functions, as in the following example: The modifying adjective to a plural head noun can be marked (3)  Even if the head noun semantically refers to more than one entity, it can occur in its unmarked general number form. Plural is then implied by context, or expressed morphologically on the verb or copula, as in the following example: The head noun usually occurs in the morphologically marked plural form when it modified by a numeral above one: Head nouns that are modified by an unspecific quantifier may or may not be marked for plural number: In a phrase consisting of a head noun and a modifier, the definite marker is not attached to the head noun, but to the modifier, as in (10). However, the entire noun phrasesbut not only the modifying nounare in scope of the definite marker. A possessive suffix, in contrast, is attached to the head noun, as in (11) Only when the modifier explicitly refers to an individual, the possessive suffix is attached to the modifying noun: When the definite marker and a possessive suffix co-occur in a phrase, the definite marker is always suffixed to the modifier and the possessive suffix to the head, as in (13). The only exceptions are modifying nouns which explicitly refer to an individual. In this case the definite marker and the possessive suffix are attached to the modifier, as in (14)

Coordination of noun phrases
The common coordinative conjunction in Mesqan is wa 'and'. However, this conjunction can be replaced by the comitativemarker tä -, in particular for connecting two nouns which form a semantic unit, as in the following examples: (15)  It is also possible to coordinate two noun phrases by attaching the contrastive focus marker -m which has expanding/additive meaning to the firstentity in an enumeration which is immediately followed by the verb xänä 'He/It be(came).'in the perfective aspect. Such arrangement may gather as disjunctive coordination, as in the following examples: 'um-u (bäšäwawussïtt' bet k'urbemxänääruk'eč'umu.) far-DIR expensive-COP.3SG.M '(The price of) a house in Addis Ababa is expensive be it nearor (lit. and) far.' Furthermore, it is also possible to coordinating two noun phrases by attaching the contrastive focus marker -m which has expanding/additive meaning to the firstentity in an enumeration which is immediately followed by the the jussive of the verb xänä'He/It be(came).', yäxï n 'It should be!'. Such combination may function as disjunctive coordination, as in the following examples: (21) ärša k'äl-m yä-xn-ø nïk' fäyya-u (äršak'älïmyäxïnnïk' fäyyawu.) farm small-FOC 3-be(come).JUS-SG.M big good-COP.3SG.M 'Farm (land) is good be it is small or big.' In addition to the conjunction č'ïn 'but', exclusion can also be expressed by a construction in which the two coordinated NPs are connected by the subordinated negated imperfective of the verb xänä 'He/It be(came).' Note that in this construction the subject of the verb xänä 'He/It be(came).' must be co-referential with the preceding noun: In exclusive constructions like (22), the noun following the verb xänä 'He/It be(came).' is confirmed as fulfilling the intended proposition of the speaker, while the noun preceding it does not.

Summary and conclusion
This chapter summarizes the findings from the previous section on the introduction and Noun Phrase of Mesqana language which has not been well studied previously. Thus, the major aim of this study was to present a comprehensive Noun Phrase description of this language. To this effect the study is divided into three main sections: section one is introduction which contains the people and their language, and research methodology, section two is the structure of Noun Phrase, section three is co-ordination of Noun Phrase.The basic structure (word order) of the noun phrase in Mesqan is:demonstrativequantifier -modifier -HEAD-determiner. The head of a NP can be a pronoun, a noun or an adjective. The head alone can constitute a full noun phrase. Adjectives, nouns in the genitive, or relative clauses function as modifiers of head nouns. Quantifiers are numerals, unspecific quantifiers, determiners include the definite marker, demonstrative pronouns, and possessive suffixes occur in two positions to the head noun. Only the demonstrative pronouns and the number 'one' when used as indefinite marker occur in phrase-initial position, while all other determiners follow the head.
To conclude, this study provides a comprehensive description of the Noun Phrase of Mesqan. However, the study does not treat properties, types and Noun Phrase constructions in different languagesthis remains a task for further research.