A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF NOUNS AND ADJECTIVES IN THE NUPE LANGUAGE

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Date
2012-08
Authors
ALHAJI, GARBA IBRAHIM
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Abstract
Nupe is a minority language spoken by the Nupe ethnic group in Nigeria. The morphology of Nupe has so far not been studied adequately in a way that the internal structure of the Nupe word is explicitly analysed. The present work studied and analysed the morphological structures of Nupe Nouns and adjectives. The aim was to bring about increase in awareness and understanding of the morphology of the Nupe Language. Therefore, the objectives of the study were: to identify nouns and adjectives in the Nupe language and their subclassifications; to carry out a morphological analysis of the nouns and adjectives in Nupe language; to group the nouns and adjectives in Nupe according to their morphological structures; to discover the morphological processes of nouns and adjectives in the language and their morphological system. To generate data for this research endeavour, the researcher used a combination of methods of introspection, unstructured interview and nonparticipant observation. Therefore, the data for this study were derived from both primary and secondary source materials, such as the written Nupe news items, jottings from interviews and conversations, pamphlets, textbooks and the Nupe Dictionary. The researcher further used the Hockett’s (1954) morphological model of IA (Item and Arrangement) to carry out the morphological analysis of the data on the Nupe nouns and adjectives. The findings and conclusion of the study revealed that Nupe uses derivational morphology more than inflectional morphology. The phenomenon of morphological elision is a prominent feature in the morphology of Nupe words. Furthermore, there are degrees of morphological productivity in the Nupe nouns and adjectives studied. The Nupe plural morpheme ‘-zhi’ seems to rank high in morphological productivity because it can be attached to almost all Nupe count nouns with relative freedom. In Nupe, the system of gradability of the adjectives is a mixture of regular and irregular patterns. Consequently, the study concluded that Nupe is partly an agglutinating language.
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A THESIS SUMBITTED TO THE POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA NIGERIA
Keywords
MORPHOLOGICAL, ANALYSIS, NOUNS, ADJECTIVES, NUPE, LANGUAGE
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