The Ministry of Higher and secondary education of the Republic of Uzbekistan

2.2 Aspects of word formation

These lists covered a wide range of semantic fields including, but not limited to, universe, body parts, animals, plants, food and beverages, daily life, physical actions, states of being, numeral systems, measurement, seasons and geography pertaining to all possible grammatical categories. A few pieces of narrations were also collected.

Brief typological account of the language Luro is an agglutinative language with heavy use of derivational morphology employing all kinds of affixes. Although word order is flexible at different syntactic structures, Luro is a verb initial language with prototypical ordering of VOS. When a sentence contains negative proposition, or a quantifier or an adverb the canonical word order may optionally change to SVO with these categories occurring in initial position of a sentence. Not all cases are overtly marked. Inanimate objects are more often than not preceded by an object marker. The language has a ten-vowel system with low back vowel offering nasalization as phonemic. There are sporadic instances of nasalized front vowels, however no minimal pairs were found to establish their phonemic status. Thus, the language provides following vowels at phonemic level: i, e, ɛ, u, o, ɔ, ə, ɨ, ɑ, and ɑ̃. The initial auditory analysis does not offer phonemic status to vowel length. Diphthongs and triphthongs also occur in the language. Luro has 16 consonant phonemes with two prominent characteristics: (i) all oral stops are unreleased word finally and (ii) there are no voiced stops in the language – an areal feature of the Nicobaric languages. Despite being surrounded by the Indo-Aryan languages 12 Anvita Abbi & Vysakh R and most of the speakers being bilingual in Hindi, retroflex sounds – the characteristic feature of the language has not penetrated into Luro. Other than geminates there are no consonant clusters at any position. The inventory of consonants at the phonemic level is: p, t, k, c, ʔ, m, n, ɲ, ŋ, r, f, s, h, j, w, and l. The preferred syllabic structure cvcv is maintained in producing new words. 3. Word formation processes

Compounding As in all Austroasiatic languages compounding is a productive word formation process in Luro. Constituents of a compound can be either an adjective, adverb, or a noun. A maximum number of three nouns can form a compound noun. In the following examples the second column lists the constituents and their grammatical nature.