The Syntax of Igbo Causatives: A Minimalist Account
Abstract
The Landmarks Series is a research and publications outfit funded by the Landmarks Research Foundation to publish recent outstanding doctoral dissertations on any aspect of Nigerian linguistics, languages, literatures and cultures. This study examines causatives in Igbo within the minimalist program. It identifies three types of causative: analytical, morphological and lexical. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 is the general introduction, while Chapter 2 examines in some details the theory of causativity. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 focus on the analytical, morphological and lexical causative respectively.
... Thus, this principle does not allow the satisfaction of other elements other than the moving element. According to Anyanwu (2007), greed ensures that constituents do not move in order to check off features that have already been checked; hence, a DP already in case-marked position cannot move in order to check its case-features since such features can be checked in UNIUYO JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES (UUJH), VOL. 27, NO. 2, OCTOBER 2023 its base position. Radford (1997), (Marantz (1995), Obiamalu (2015) remark that such movement, will be altruistic. ...
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
... Some of the popularly cited works in Igbo grammar (Green & Igwe, 1963;Carrell, 1970;Emenanjo, 1978Emenanjo, , 2015Oluikpe, 1979;Uwalaka, 1988;Mmadike, 1998;Ndimele, 2004;Anyanwu, 2007;Mbah, 2016). Some of the Igbo scholars have studied anaphor in one way or the other. ...
This work investigates Anaphors in Ikwuano Igbo. Anaphoric expressions are useful in the meaningful interpretations of NPs in a discourse. This study adopts the Binding Theory (BT) approach of GB syntax in examining anaphoric expressions in Igbo. Data for this work were elicited from native speakers of Ikwuano in Ikwuano area of Abia State, Nigeria. This paper was verified for cross-referencing purposes given the researcher’s native speaking intuition and introspection. This study investigates anaphors and antecedents and also demonstrates the concepts of C-command and binding, among others in Ikwuano Igbo. The work reveals that Ikwuano Igbo has two types of anaphors- the reflexive and the reciprocal anaphors. The study demonstrates that the binding theory investigates the syntactic relationship that can or must hold between a given proform and its antecedent. In this respect, anaphors (reflexive and reciprocal pronouns) behave very differently from personal pronouns. The work demonstrates the concepts of binding, Co-indexation, Co-referentiality, locality constraint and C-constituent command to show dependency between the antecedents and the anaphors in Ikwuano Igbo. This paper also reveals that Ikwuano Igbo has anaphoric expressions that do not mark gender. The Binding Theory shows that the antecedent and the anaphor occur in the same governing category. Also it shows that a pronominal must be free in its governing category and an R-expression must be free everywhere in a sentence according to the regulating principles of the Theory. This paper reveals the descriptive nature of antecedent- anaphor relationship in the study of syntactic structures for grammaticality.
This paper examines relativization in Ikwuano Igbo. The problem of word order and the selectional rule for grammaticality in the realization of semantic affinity that exist in sentence construction cannot be ignored. This study investigates the embedding features that make sentential structures to be embedded in other sentences. The relative pronouns found in Ikwuano Igbo include; “ónyé- who,whom”, “nkè- which”, “nà- that”, “mà- whether”, “kà- that”. The relative pronoun occurs as the subject of a relative clause making it to be grammatical. The theoretical framework adopted by this study is the embedding principle of “Principles and Parameters”. This theory is a brain child of Noam Chomsky. This study takes a descriptive approach of language analysis. The data for this paper is elicited utterances by adult native speakers and intuition from the researcher. The aim of this paper is to examine relativization in Ikwuano Igbo with a view to establishing the Ikwuano strategy. This paper explains the motivation for the relative pronoun strategy and its behavior in the language. This study reveals that relativization in Ikwuano Igbo remains the most productive strategy in Igbo and many other languages for grammaticality. The study shows that relativization performs an emphatic function in the grammatical structure of Ikwuano Igbo.
The paper proposes that word-level causatives can be classified into two types, simplex causatives and complex causatives. Simplex causatives can be further classified into labile simplex causatives and non-labile simplex causatives, and complex causatives can be further classified into derivational, compounding, and inflectional complex causatives. It shows that it is possible for simplex causatives and some form of complex causatives to co-exist in a language. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the existence of productive compounding/inflectional causatives tends to lead to the absence of a reasonable number of labile simplex causatives and that there is a functional basis for this. Finally, the paper shows that Chinese manifests a typological shift from the use of non-compounding word-level causatives to the use of productive compounding complex causatives.
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