To elucidate the syntactic structure of infinitives in igbo language. Igbo language features a wide variety of highly productive concatenative and nonconcatenative morphological processes. Igbo written language is phonetic and it uses most of the english alphabet. Syntactic problems among igbo speakers of english with abstract, chapters 15, references and questionnaire. The final section looks at some morphological processes, concentrating only on those of greater. An important challenge comes from the complex morphological behaviour of igbo. This site is like a library, use search box in the widget to get ebook that you want. In such languages, the basic concepts of word and morpheme are natural and inevitable analytic categories. Igbo is a tonal language with two distinctive tones, high and low. Igbo has been strangely neglected by lexicographers. This work will benefit linguists and igbo scholars. This development favours languages with rich electronic linguistic. Other languages are ewe, mina, yoruba, igbo, wolof, kordofanian and fulfulde.
It originated in england and is the dominant language of the u. Although it is spoken predominantly in biafra former eastern nigeria, it is widely spoken in almost all the countries of this world by the igbo diaspora. The language belongs to the svo syntax structure in which the verb plays very important and crucial role. Computational studies of igbo language are constrained by nonavailability of large electronic corpora of igbo text, a prerequisite for datadriven morphological induction. An important characteristic of language is that it. Other verbs are adjoined to a helping verb from igbo, specifically involving an adapted form. Area of study the area of this study is anaku in ayamelum, anambra state, nigeria, a language group a variety of igbo language of about sixteen thousand 16,000 inhabitants. Igbo has an eightvowel system which is symmetric with regard to the. I hit the man on his head, each of the words is a free morpheme that cant be broken down into smaller parts. The language is written in the roman script references. Demographics and language amharic also known as abyssinian, amarinya, amarigna, and ethiopian is the national language of ethiopia. Orthography theories and the standard igbo orthography. Contrastive study of english and yoruba morphological system. In twentyfive chapters this book covers phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
Department of linguistics, igbo and other nigerian languages, university of nigeria, nsukka. Yoruba language has its own features that are not found in other languages. The consonants are similar to the use as in the english language, though there are separate combinations of consonants, i. Igbo is officially recognized as one of the three major. These processes serve as productive resources that make the words of a language limitless. Okun and oworo are the two main dialects in yoruba. It is in view of the above that a synchronic study of english and yoruba morphological systems is undertaken here. Corpussize quantification for computational morphological analysis of igbo language. In this study, the researcher will dwell more on derivational morphology because. Some salient issues in the unsupervised learning of igbo. Igbo english and english igbo dictionary this vocabulary is part of a published book that provides simple and easytoread insights into igbo language and culture. Request pdf interfixes in igbo morphology this article uses synchronic evidence to show that the interfix in igbo does not always divide its host into two equal parts.
Introduction to the igbo language by onyema nwazue onye nk. Grammar several of the examples that i have shared show that tone, defined as a contrastive feature of morphemes, obscures the distinction between phonology, morphology, and syntax. In some cases a third, downstepped high tone is recognized. Journal of languages and culture insertion strategies used. In english, some stems that occur with negative prefixes are not free, such as kempt and sheveled. An account of simple past and past perfect tenses in tiv and igbo by waya d. It contains numerous intext exercises which involve the reader in doing. In such cases i think we can say that tone is the glue that holds the grammar together. Probably the main reasons for this neglect have been the considerable variation between the dialects of igbo, noted from the beginning of igbo studies, and the lack of a single early authoritative figure to impose a standard written language, as crowther did for yoruba. T and eze, chinwe mrs department of linguistics and nigerian languages, unn wayatarhom. Its loan words are mostly from arabic, english, hausa and igbo languages. Morphology is the study of word formation in language. And that was the same time i learned about tone in my igbo language class.
The study adopts a descriptive approach based on surface structure analysis. Igbo language is one of the three major languages, spoken in nigeria, west africa. Enhancing the vitality of igbo language learning in school through indigenous knowledge systems ogbonna anyanwu, roseline ndimele. Not only does that book describe the wide variety of the traditions in this part of nigeria, attention is also paid to normal daytoday facets of life in the town and. It is on this premise that this paper attempts to examine the functional analysis of the prime. Jul 25, 2019 unlike inflectional affixes, the potential number of derivational affixes in the english language is limited only by the scope of the vocabulary of a given speaker or writer.
Other african language groups are nilosaharan, which includes 200 languages spoken in central and eastern africa. Cascaded affixation is a common occurrence in igbo morphology owing to the agglutinative nature of the language and it is also highly productive in the language. In the context of creating a tagger for the african language igbo, we compare the performance of some existing taggers, implementing such an approach, to a novel method for handling morphologically complex unknown words, based on morphological reconstruction i. The interpretation of plural morphology and nonobligatory. Journal of languages and culture insertion strategies. This study uses the nomenclatures of this pdf handout to analyze the morphological processes in anaku igbo to prove or disprove the universality of the processes. Igbo is a tonal language with two distinctive tones, the high and low. Most onesyllable words in the english language are free morphemes.
In a language like english, where word order is much less free, we can still find evidence of a similar kind for the distinction between morphemes and words. They are uneven in terms of scope covered, length, the density of their contents and their degrees of difficulty. Africa also gifted phonology with the floating tone. Existing unsupervised models, which are frequentsegment based, do not sufficiently address nonconcatenative morphology and cascaded affixation prevalent in igbo morphology. Since the th century is has been the language of the court and dominant population in highland ethiopia. The igbo language is one of the languages of the benue congo family spoken predominantly in the southeast part of nigeria. Oct 25, 2018 computational studies of igbo language are constrained by nonavailability of large electronic corpora of igbo text, a prerequisite for datadriven morphological induction. Igbo language belongs to an agglutinating language because grammatical relationships and word structure are indicated by free.
Partofspeech tagset and corpus development for igbo, an. Some historians and archaeologists have tried to place the igbo race and their language as one of the earliest inhabitants on this earth. The khoisan group only contains about 30 languages, most of which are spoken in namibia and botswana. Heffnerb, and cristina schmitt adepartment of linguistics and germanic, slavic, asian, and african languages, michigan state university. You can add derivational morphemes to free morphemes, which are those words that cant be divided into smaller component parts and retain meaning.
Igbo language simple english wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A creoles syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics are, therefore, derived from its substrate languages. Igbo is a tonal language and has vowel harmony as well as consonants with double articulation. Igbo language for beginners an introductory learning material for any individual whose original language is not igbo language. Some salient issues in the unsupervised learning of igbo morphology. Space use patterns and building morphology in yoruba and benin 023.
The presentation shows how simple verb roots and affixes could generate multiplicity of verb forms and new words for which reason igbo language is classified as agglutinating in. Introduction the three studies of traditional and contemporary domestic units samples presented here are from benin city. Pdf inflection in the imilike dialect of igbo gerald. Standard igbo is an amalgam of the different dialects of the igbo language.
Morphology is a comprehensive introduction to contemporary morphological theory and analysis in generative grammar. As you probably know already, igbo is one of the major african languages. English language, a west germanic language of the indoeuropean language family that is closely related to frisian, german, and dutch languages. The method of data analysis was contrastive, since this research is a contrastive study of noun formation in english and igbo. Unlike yoruba and igbo, however, the fact that saramaccan is a creole makes the existence of. Although, some works have been done on the inflectional and extensional suffixes in the language but no detailed study so far has been done on the prime suffixes in the language. These word labels are derived from the words by assigning a sequence of. Corpussize quantification for computational morphological. At first sight, the question is igbo an endangered language, would appear to be grossly misplaced, since the survival of the language seems to be well guaranteed by its status both as one of the three main languages of nigeria and one of the major languages of literature, education, and commerce in africa. Igbo language symposium 3, 28 november 2011 zik university ka awka, anambara state, 9ja nigeria igbo transitivity in a derivational framework victor manfredi african studies center, boston university working draft, last updated 18 january 2012 1.
Verbs were inflected for tenseaspect, mood and polarity in. The igbo language is one of the three major nigerian languages after hausa and yoruba. F c ogbalu and the igbo language download ebook pdf. Morphology, morphological processescommunication, concatenate processes, language universals, anaku, igbo language.
Learn the basics of igbo language using games, animation, voice, sound and colourful graphics. As a beginner s lesson, this book is designed with visual instructional design to facilitate learning and retention. Predicting morphologicallycomplex unknown words in igbo. Using examples of tape recorded conversational data from fifty educated adult igboenglish bilinguals resident in port harcourt, nigeria, this paper demonstrates that lone english verbs are typically inserted into otherwise igbo utterances by means of igbo verbal inflectional morphology. A functional analysis of the prime suffixes in igbo morpho. The interpretation of plural morphology and nonobligatory number marking. The suffix ize, objected to by edwin newman in words like hospitalize, has a long and venerable history. Semitic templatic morphology mccarthy 1981 and partial reduplication marantzs 1982. Many of you chose to look up ize words as part of your first assignment according to hans marchand, who wrote a book entitled the categories and types of presentday english word formation, university of alabama press, 1969, the suffix ize comes originally from the greek izo. The language of amharic is spoken in the ethiopian government, court system, and on all official documents. In igbo language, speaking from the perspective of ezaa dialect, question transformation is obligatory, involving movement, deletion, substitution or adjunction, or combination of some or all of these. Questions are puts of some derivative inputs via transformation rules.
In the first part, some basic terms in morphology is introduced, in particular, morpheme, affix, prefix, suffix, boundand free forms. Morphological processes in anaku igbo journal of pan african. Morphology system is the backbone of a natural language processing system and no application in the field can survive without a good morphology system to support it 3. The languages tone system was given by john goldsmith as an example of autosegmental phenomena that go beyond the linear model of phonology laid out in the sound pattern of english. As a result, it would impossible to create a comprehensive list of derivational morphemes but we can look at a few representative examples. Mcwhorter 1998, for example, in developing his notion of the creole prototype, speci. In addition, there are even different grammar rules and letters in the igbo dialects. Morphology, morphological reconstruction, igbo, unknown words prediction. Addressing the challenges of igbo computational morphological.
It is believed that a comparative study of this type will reveal the differences which are assumed to be responsible for linguistic interference and are thus sources of difficulties for a yoruba learner of english. Contrastive study of english and yoruba morphological. This paper examines inflection in the imilike dialect of the igbo language with emphasis on the verb inflection. Click download or read online button to get f c ogbalu and the igbo language book now.
To answer the question as to why the verbal inflectional morphology of igbo rather than that of english should be used, we show that this is predicted by the matrix language frame mlf model, according to which integration into the bound morphology of the base language is expected. The igbo language as a verbal language derives so many nominal from. Specifically, the yoruba language is classified as a member of the defoid category of the benuecongo subgroup of languages, part of the nigercongo language family campbell 1991. As a result, there are various ways to spell and pronounce the same word in the different dialects. In igbo language, the process of deverbalisation involves the reduplication.
In igbo studies, the terms affix and affixation have received the attention of analysts. Deverbalisation has other morphological process through which it is realised. In the defoid group of languages, yoruba is in the yoruboid cluster which also includes igala. In compounding, as already mentioned above, two independent igbo words can be combined to form a single word.
A functional analysis of the prime suffixes in igbo morphosyntax. F c ogbalu and the igbo language download ebook pdf, epub. Just as in other agglutinating languages, word formation creation in igbo is achieved through affixation and compounding. While there had been early descriptions of tonal morphemes e. Yoruba is a benuecongo language spoken mainly in nigeria by about 30 million native speakers. The place of the affix in the morphology of the igbo verb. The language has approximately 44 million speakers, who live mostly in nigeria and are primarily of igbo descent. A history of the igbo language an igbo dictionary chinua achebe denounces standard igbo books helpful for igbo language study sources for the study of igbo proverbs the first igbo novel, omenuko a brief biography of the author of omenuko an igbo tale.
The latter ultimately colonized the country and after the independence of nigeria the igbo developed a sense of identity and tried to secede unsuccessfully in 1967 as the independent nation of biafra. The igbo language has both bound morphemes as well as free morphemes. We can tell an english usage with igbo language prompted features by merely examining the text or listening to the accent. It comes in an adventure quest to acquire a piece of land defined as ala. This study focuses on analyzing and contrasting the processes of morphemes of both english and igbo languages. In igbo language, the morphological processes involve the formal processes as operations by which words are formed, altering the status of existing words, as well as the use of different configurations of tones on a word to form more words. We will begin our study of the language with a brief introduction. Since language occurs in a great range of modalities. Abstract datadriven approaches to morphology learning have gained popularity over rulebased approaches. An analysis of the yoruba language with english phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax jolaade okanlawon. Egba, ijebu, oyoibadan, ekiti, igbomina, ijesa, ikale, ife and onko. Morphology ii more on various categories of morphemes prefixes and suffixes are by definition always bound, but what about the stems. There arent only eight adjectives in the igbo language. The language s tone system was given by john goldsmith as an example of autosegmental phenomena that go beyond the linear model of phonology laid out in the sound pattern of english.