EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
EJLLS Publication
EJLLS| Title: | Eggon Nominal Inflectional Morphology |
| Author(s): | Hammed SALAMI |
| Abstract: | The paper examined nominal inflectional morphology in Eggon with a view to providing insight into the formatives involved in the formation of nominals. Affixation (prefixation) and reduplication were discovered to play major roles in the inflectional morphology of nominals in Eggon. Suppletion was also found to be productive in the formation of few non- pronominals as well as pronominals in Eggon. The analysis carried out were based on the weak lexicalist hypothesis while bare phrase structure was used for the diagrammatic sketch of the internal structure of nominals. Class markers attested were accounted for as vestiges of noun-class marking features of the language at a point in history based on the fact that they are just two and they only affect two categories of nouns (human and place names) quite unlike the way the phenomenon works in the known noun-class languages. Finally, functional categories (plural markers, noun-class markers) as well as featural affixes play a significant role in the head-complement relationship within the derived nominals. |
| Keywords: | nominal morphology, Eggon, prefixation, reduplication |
