Thesis and Dissertations

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Browsing Thesis and Dissertations by Author "Umennaike, Chika Chidi"

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    CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ASPECTS OF MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF IGBO AND EGGON LANGUAGES.
    (DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS, FACULTY OF ARTS, NASARAWA STATE UNIVERSITY, KEFFI, 2019-01-21) Umennaike, Chika Chidi
    It is a known fact that in spite of the universal characteristic‟s languages share in common, they tend to display parametric differences at all levels of linguistic analysis. This study titled “Contrastive study of aspects of Morphological Processes of Igbo and Eggon languages” aims at investigating and identifying areas of convergence and divergence between the morphological processes of the two languages and the pedagogical implications these may have. The study focused on the Owerri dialect of Igbo and the Wana dialect of Eggon from which data were collected from five native speakers from each of the languages under study. The Blench wordlist of 1017 lexical items was the instrument used for the interview to generate corpora for the comparison of the morphological processes of the two languages. The prescribed steps of Contrastive Analysis of Lado (1957) were used to accomplish the findings and the descriptive method of interlinear morpheme -by-morpheme glosses were used for the analyses of data in keeping with Leipzig Glossing Rules. The productive morphological processes compared were: Affixation, clipping, Reduplication compounding and Pluralization. The study revealed that Prefixation performs both inflectional and derivational functions in Igbo while it performs the inflectional roles of plurality of nouns and verb tense marking in Eggon. Whereas Igbo employs suffixation for verb tense marking, Eggon does not have suffixes. Interfixation performs both inflectional and derivational functions in Igbo but is not productive in Eggon. Suprafixation performs both lexical and grammatical functions in Igbo and Eggon. Clippingand Compounding are also productive in both languages. Complete reduplication performs both derivational and inflectional roles in Eggon but plays a derivational role in Igbo. Partial reduplication performs both inflectional and derivational functions in Igbo and in Eggon it performs an inflectional role in marking plurality. Furthermore, plurality is generally marked by the morphological processes of prefixation, reduplication and suprafixation in Eggon while in Igbo number is expressed by the use of quantifiers. These discoveries are very useful for classroom instruction as they could guide teachers and students alike in predicting likely areas of errors in L2 instruction