Revisiting WH-Movement in Basa Language: A Government Binding Account

Basa language is classified as belonging to Kainji family, under the sub-phylum Westem-Kainji (Croizier, and Blench, 1992:32). It is spoken in North Central Nigeria, such as the Federal Councils, Niger, Nasarawa, Benue, and Kogi States. This work investigates the intricacies and complexities underlying wh-movement in^Basa. In addition to the native intuitions of the researcher, data collected for this work include discourse observation and staged discourse by fluent native speakers. The study discovered that when this movement occurs, the moved constituent moves with all the grammatical properties associated with it at the extraction site. The study uncovered six (6) wh-phrases as items that are generated within IP but are moved within the containing SPEC-CP as leftmost constituents to form non-echo wh-questions. When this happens, it leaves the extraction site and adjoins within SPEC-CP leaving an empty category in the vacated position. This empty trace is properly/antecedent governed by the moved wh-item in- line with requirement of empty category principle of Government and Binding, in the spirit of which this study is undertaken. In Basa, I-constituents remain in-situ. The interesting discoveries in this work can be replicated in related African languages, especially those characterised by a similar syntactic parameter.