A Comparative Morphological Analysis of Derivation and Inflection in EkeGusii and English: Processes, Functions, and Typological Implications

This study undertakes a comparative morphological analysis of derivation and inflection in EkeGusii (a Bantu language) and English (an Indo-European language). It aims to uncover how each language encodes grammatical and lexical meaning through morphological processes, while exploring theoretical and typological implications. Employing a descriptive-analytical approach and grounded in Morpheme-based Morphology and Typological Linguistics, the paper examines corpus data and native speaker elicitation to analyze affixation, reduplication, noun class systems, and verb inflection. Findings reveal that while English exhibits a relatively poor inflectional system, EkeGusii shows a highly agglutinative and morphologically rich system, especially in verbs. The study concludes that morphological complexity is structurally motivated and carries important implications for linguistic theory, language learning, and documentation of African languages.