Agentive Nominalizations in Gı̃kũyũ and the Theory of Mixed Categories

In order to make examples morphologically transparent, we have transcribed certain vowels separately between morpheme boundaries even though some of these vowels are elided or coalesced in speech. Our segmental transcriptions follow Mugane 1996 and 1997. The seven vowels transcribed i, ı̃, e, a, o ũ, u have the approximate respective values [i, e, ε, a, , o, u], each of which can be short or long. Long vowels are indicated by doubling. m, n, ny, ng’ represent labial, coronal, palatal, and velar nasals, respectively. mb, nd, nj, ng are the corresponding prenasalized stops, and b, th, c, g the corresponding fricatives. The glosses use Arabic numerals to represent noun classes and small Roman numerals to represent values in the category of person. Abbreviations are nom/nominalizer, assoc/associative, (adnominal) particle, dem/demonstrative, applic/applicative, recip/reciprocal, neg/negation, fut/future, obj/object, rel/relativizer, int/intensifier, perf/perfect, subj/subject, refl/reflexive, intj/interjection, fv/final vowel, sg/singular, perf.part/perfect participle, hab.part/habitual participle.