An Analysis of Dholuo Portmanteau Morph: Redefining the Portmanteau Morph

This study deals with the analysis of portmanteau morph as found in Dholuo language. The work is divided into introduction which deals with the background of Dholuo language and the attempt to build the need for the study which is hinged on the idea that the concept of portmanteau as used in the linguistics books is not adequate to capture Dholuo grammar. A lot of data is generated and analyzed to prove the fact that there is need to redefine the portmanteau morph. The study entails Lexical morphology approach which provides us with the means of describing a number of morphological phenomena in an illuminating manner, with the word rather than the morpheme playing a pivotal role (Katamba, 1993,p.111).Lexical morphology is more in tune with the word based models of traditional, pre-structuralist approaches to morphology and modern word-and-paradigm morphology. The analysis of Dholuo portmanteau morph is also done within the theoretical frame work of lexical morphology, inflectional morphology and derivational morphology, this broader approach would help to capture the morphological behavior of the portmanteau morph.