27.3056, Diss: Igala, General Ling: Salem Ochala Ejeba: 'A Grammar of Igala'

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3056. Mon Jul 25 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3056, Diss: Igala, General Ling: Salem Ochala Ejeba: 'A Grammar of Igala'

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry,
                                   Robert Coté, Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Ashley Parker <ashley at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2016 13:28:04
From: Salem Ejeba [salem.ejeba at uniport.edu.ng]
Subject: A Grammar of Igala

 
Institution: University of Port Harcourt 
Program: Descriptive Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2016 

Author: Salem Ochala Ejeba

Dissertation Title: A Grammar of Igala 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Subject Language(s): Igala (igl)


Dissertation Director(s):
Ethelbert Emmanuel Kari
Shirley Yul-Ifode

Dissertation Abstract:

This work, A Grammar of Igala, is a descriptive-oriented research on the Igala
language,  a member of the New Bennue-Congo language family. The language has
an approximate population of 2,000,000 native speakers in Kogi State, Nigeria.
 This research focuses on the formal levels of linguistics and aspects of the
semantics,  as well as the systematic interrelation of these levels in a
comprehensive grammar. The researcher utilised the primary method of
investigator-based introspective evidence and a secondary informant-based
contact with other native speakers as collaborators in gathering data for this
research. The researcher collected language samples from the native speakers
through direct personal contact and analysed the data using the descriptive
method of interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glossing. The research establishes
that Igala has 28 phonemic consonants and seven vowels. The canonical syllable
types are V and CV. Resyllabification In the language involves retiming of
segments based on tone, and the moraic status of the segments is expressed by
the duration of the tones. The work identifies 9 word classes as well as
ideophones and clitics. Fully fledged pronouns have morphologically toneless
clitic counterparts, which are toned in their syntactic context. Clitics in
Igala generally bear grammatical tones of various categories because of their
morphological tonelessness and their availability for postlexical tone
assignment. The interface of morphology/syntax in clitics thus eliminates
morphological tonelessness, a priori functionally, tone being an inherent
property of words and postlexically of clitics. Igala is an SVC language like
many Niger-Congo languages. The language makes a future/non-future tense
distinction. The discussions of tones and clitics are core aspects of the
Igala grammar, as attested to in this work. The discussion of the morphosyntax
and the tone-syntax interface are therefore the hub of the grammar of Igala,
as they border on the generally complex interaction of clitics and tones in
the organisation of the described grammatical distinctions. Complementary
binominals are rigidly irreversible structures with implications in Igala
semantics. They are conjoined using the complementary binominal marker. The
binominals demonstrate a grammatically specified pattern defined over a
conceptual space showing the network among conceptual categories such as
kinship, marital, social, hunter-hunted, more-less and cause-effect
relationships in Igala.




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

        Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3056	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/