EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
EJLLS Publication
EJLLS| Title: | Argument Structure Of The Igbo Verbs: Inter-language Analysis |
| Author(s): | Matthew Onyebuchi Ndiribe |
| Abstract: | The study investigates the argument structures of the Igbo verbs. The study takes a comparative method of analysis where the English and Icelandic languages are used to see how related or otherwise they are to Igbo language. We did a comprehensive literature review of these languages and discovered that the Igbo language has a similar sentence structure with English and Icelandic. Most sentence structures observed to operate in both English and Icelandic also operate in the Igbo language. This is because the Igbo language has a SVO structure just like English and Icelandic. There is however some differences brought about by the mere fact that most Igbo verbs have inherent verb complements or bound cognate nouns following them which seem as if they are arguments themselves. This study addresses that matter and concludes that those inherent verb complements/bound cognate nouns are not arguments in themselves. They are obligatory attachments. The Igbo language also has no articles whether definite or indefinite and this causes some confusion in sentence analyses. From our finding, we discover that the Igbo language shares more similarities with English and Icelandic languages than differences. From this we conclude that the concept of universal grammar (a concept that states that languages resemble in certain aspects) is true. |
| Keywords: | Argument structure, Verb, Igbo, English, Icelandic, Comparative analysis |
