A Grammar of Mombo Songho Dialect

nólò ‘friend’ nóló-ŋgè ‘friendship’ɛĺá ‘enemy’ ɛĺá-ŋgè ‘enmity’ [add to the dictionary]See § xxx for a hypothesis of emergence from the segmentally identical humanplural marker. In accordance with the hypothesis proposed above, nólóŋgè retains itsnon-abstract meaning ‘a group of friends’. The noun adds the PL marker only whenused in this meaning. nólóngé-gè ‘friendship-PL’ can be interpreted as ‘many groups offriends’4.3.3 Verbal NounsThere are two productive patterns of verbal noun formation. Both derived nounsare used to denote a state of affaires itself, being non-specified in terms of grammaticalcategories, like the tense-aspect, the mood or polarity. Being Identical semantically,they are however different in their syntactic behavior in complex syntacticconstructions. See §xxx for details.The nominal features of verbal nouns show up in their ability to be combined withpossessors (see § 5.xxx). However notably verbal nouns are not able to take the pluralmarker.Interestingly, both verbal nouns can not be derived from a (morphologically)stative stem.4.3.3.1.1 Verbal noun in -ŋgéThis verbal noun is formed by adding suffix -ŋgé to a verbal with final ɛ,e or i. Inthe majority of cases the input stem coincides segmentally with the stem found in thesimple perfective form of the verb. The suffix is not harmonized with the stem in ATR.Regardless of the input all derivatives appear with all-high tone contour:(xxx) input gloss outputpélé ‘applaud’ pélé-ŋgésɛḿɛ́ ‘slaughter’ sɛḿɛ́-ŋgékání ‘do’ kání-ŋgémályê: ‘see’ mályé-ŋgégwé: ‘go out’ gwé-ŋgéúní ‘walk’ has an irregular verbal noun form únú-ŋgé, instead of expected *úníŋgè. Thisdoesn’t seem to be a surface realization of underlying i-final stem conditioned by thephonetic context. Cf. other i-final stems forming their verbal nouns regularly:(xxx) i-stem gloss VNkíní ‘scoop’ kíní-ŋgé35