PROSODIES AND VERB STEMS IN GUDE

This paper focuses on certain morphophonemic changes which take place in verbal stem formation in Gucfe, a Chadic language of Nigeria. The nature of these changes requires an underlying representation for Gucfe formatives that leads to assigning the classificatory features of the phonology to syllables rather than to single segments in the customary way. For the purpose of making generalizations about morphophonemic changes of Gucfe, a system of analysis is needed that covers all the relevant generalizations about the morphophonemic changes. For this purpose a traditional phonemic analysis is not quite satisfactory. To substantiate this, first consider a traditional phonemic analysis.