Declarative and Non-declarative Speech Acts in Luwo

Abstract

Discovering different senses which a single word may convey has been at the top of my thoughts during my ten-years of translation of the New Testament into Luwo. The semantic lectures on polysemy, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy have deepened my thought and made me ask about what possibilities there are to express different senses of words in Luwo. Lectures on Morphosyntax aroused my thought on the language forms. This made me to ask about the morphological or analytical devices that help in expressing different senses of a word in Luwo. This is the first attempt to study semantic and pragmatic features of the Luwo language. Chapter one is overview on the demography of the Luwo, language classification, geography and environment, word order typology, phonology, and orthography. In chapter two, different terminologies, which have been used in the study, are defined. In chapter three, declaratives are discussed. The discussion focuses on declarative and performative verbs, indirect speech acts and echoic speech acts. Chapter four examines interrogatives, specifically the yes/no questions, the wordquestion words, indirect and echoic interrogatives. Chapter five examines imperatives.