This paper on reflexivity and pronominal clitics in Ibibio adopts Government-Binding approach with special focus on binding and case sub-theories as its theoretical basis for analysis. The goal of these sub-theories is to identify the syntactic relationship that can or must hold between a given pronoun or noun and its antecedent. Ibibio is a Lower Cross language spoken in Akwa Ibom State of Nigeria. In considering data from the language, it would be noticed that reflexivisation as an instantiation of anaphoric dependency is morpho-syntactically encoded. The papers surveys and examines the various strategies of marking reflexivity and the morphological behavior of the object pronoun in the language. To express reflexivity, the object pronoun must co-occur with the word ídém ‘self’. The paper observes that the reciprocal anaphor is marked differently from reflexive anaphor. It is also observed that, the predicate or verbal cluster is very complex showing person, tense, pronominal clitic and the verb itself. The paper further discovers that, person concord markers, are morpho-phonologically distributed within their minimal domain suggesting that they behave more like clitics and therefore must attach to verbal string which also reflect in the object pronoun. The paper concludes that the pronominal affixes within the verbal system is a case of morpho-syntactic encoding where an affix must agree with object pronouns. Keywords: Anaphoric, Cliticization, Encoding, Pronominal, Reflexivity

The study on the acquisition of negation in the Anaañ child language aimed at examining how an Anaañ child acquires negation. It also identifies the negative forms used by the Anaañ child. Ten children from Afaha Esang, Abak Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State were studied between the ages of one and a half and four years. The children's conversations with peers at the play ground, with siblings and parents as well as interactive questionings by the researchers which were recorded formed the instrument for the collection of data for the study. The framework of principles and parameters (P&P) was adopted for the analysis of the data. The basic assumption for its adoption is the claim that children simply need to learn the values of relevant parameters to acquire the grammar of their native language. The study concluded that the Anaañ child makes use of the pre-verbal negation 'kú'-"don't" and the one-word negation, 'ìyó'-"no" to communicate rejection, denial, and disagreement. I therefore, recommend that more studies on different aspects of linguistic analysis be carried out on the Anaañ child language acquisition.

This work presents a description of the minimalist account of interrogative word movement in the Ibibio language, a morphologically rich Lower Cross language of the Niger-Congo phylum spoken in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The Ibibio language attests specific interrogative items for questioning human nouns, ànìé 'who', non-human nouns, nsòó/ǹtághà 'what/why', value and quantity, ìfáñ 'how much/many', time nsínì 'what time', places úké/mmọó 'where' and processes, dìé, 'how'. These question words which are base-generated within the VP are subsequently moved overtly or covertly to the SPEC-TP domain for case checking and SPEC-CP for focus. This work adopts Chomsky (1995) Minimalist Program (MP) framework to account for the movement of these words. As a feature driven model, the MP regards sentence derivation simply as the pairing of sound and meaning guided by economy principles of Shortest Move, Greed and procrastinate. Movement is understood to mean copy and delete. The work establishes that interrogative words move to different positions in overt syntax. It is observed that interrogative words which are base-generated within the VP Shell are overtly displaced for case activation for interrogative word subjects at the SPEC-TP. The study also observes that the movement of the interrogative words within the VP Shell can be covert for interrogative objects. It therefore postulates that the LF raising of the interrogative word is covert for interrogative word objects. The work also reveals that object interrogative words can be moved to the left periphery of the sentence identified as I SPEC-C-a FOCUS Phrase. Once they are moved, they are obligatorily followed by the focus marker ké in the language and such leftward unbounded movement is for some prominence on the focused item. Keyword: case, feature, interrogative, movement, left periphery. 1. Background to the Study Language is a complex and structured arbitrary vocal system in which words are merged for communication. It is the output of the cognitive process in which the stock of lexical items are minimally ordered for communication. Communication also includes question formation or posing a question for an answer. With the human mind as a language processor, it is assumed that lexical/phrasal elements/interrogative words are rearranged to produce different questions or sentences. Interrogative words are words used in asking questions. 2

This chapter examines complements and heads in Ibibio (New Benue-Congo) nominal compounds including the syntactic and semantic bond between constituents of a nominal compound. It adopts the Minimalist Program (MP) of (Chomsky, The minimalist program. MIT Press, 1995) and conceptualizes on (Kayne, The antisymmetry of syntax. MIT Press, 1994) Linear Corresponding Axiom (LCA) which assumes that universal word ordering between a head and its dependent, to be Specifier-Head-Complement (S-H-C), and provides a unified account for the optimal and plausible nominal compounds in the language. Data were elicited from native speakers of Ibibio to form a list of compound words. This work postulates that nominal compounds are left-headed driven in the language. Analysis of the data reveals that in a noun plus noun compound, the first noun, which occurs at the left-periphery of the compound functions as the operator and heads the compound while the other noun, which occurs to the right assumes a complement function. It is also observed that in every noun-plus-noun construction there is a relative clause reduction mechanism (delete) in which what converges at the spell-out is the optimal constituent. For instance, the compound úfộk- ítìààd ‘block house’ is derived from úfộk ákè ítìààd, ‘the house that is made of blocks’. For adjective plus noun compounds, we argue that what is spelled out at both PF and LF interface levels undergoes some leftward movement of the adjective and a subsequent deletion of the relative clause in overt syntax. For instance, àbúbíd ébòd, ‘black goat’ is derived from the constituents ‘ébòd ádòohò àbúbíd ‘a goat that is black’, that actually entered the derivation at the computation stage. Also revealed is the interplay between syntax and semantics disclosing certain ordering of lexical items in which meanings can be altered. Even when the head of an exocentric compound does not subcategorize for its syntactic value, it is observed that the semantics of the left (head) noun predicts the overall meaning of the derived nominal compound.KeywordsComplementConvergenceEndocentricOperatorOptimal