The morphosyntax of negation in Zargulla

Abstract

"Zargulla is the name by which the language examined in the present study is known among linguists and in official documents in Ethiopia. The 1994 national census, for instance, reports that there are 7800 mother tongue speakers of Zargulla. The speakers refer to themselves as Gamo and to their language as Gamotsoto. They use ‘Zargulla’ to refer to the area where they live and in reference to their ritual chief (senior sacrificer) whom they call Zargulla kaati (chief/king). Confusing to the outsider, there is another dominant linguistic group (700,000 people in the 1994 census) who also refer to themselves as Gamo and to their language as Gamotsoto and are known officially by this name. The Zargulla people, however, identify this group as Zeege orɗaac’e and they refer to the language of these people as Zeegetso orɗaac’etso. The Zargulla and the ‘official’ Gamo (i.e., Zeegetso orɗaac’etso) languages are notmutually intelligible. However, some of the members of the two language groups live in the same villages and are bilingual in Zargulla and Gamo. The two groups are agriculturalists in a similar ecological setting but, according to the British social anthropologist Dena Freeman, who did extensive field work in the area, they have different social structures, oral traditions and rituals (cf. Freeman 2006)"