Analysing Emphatic Constructions in Dholuo: A Functional Grammar Perspective

Abstract

This paper analyses emphatic constructions in Dholuo, a Western Nilotic language spoken in Kenya, within the framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). The study identifies three broad classes of emphatic constructions in Dholuo — the reordering class, the postponement class, and the dislocation class — and analyses each class in terms of clause as exchange, clause as message, and clause as representation. The reordering class encompasses passive, cleft, topicalised, and inverted constructions. The postponement class includes existential, occurrential, extraposed, and discontinued nominal element constructions. The dislocation class involves subject and object dislocation. The analysis reveals that Dholuo emphatic constructions generate three types of prominence: topical/thematic, end focus, and end weight prominence. The paper demonstrates that Halliday's Functional Grammar provides an adequate theoretical framework for analysing emphatic constructions in a non-Indo-European African language, thereby contributing to cross-linguistic evidence for the theory's universality.