Download Nominal Categories in Igala and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Linguistics in PDF only on Docsity!
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
NOMINAL CATEGORIES IN IGALA
UNUBI, SUNDAY ABRAHAM
Department of English and Literary Studies,
Faculty of Arts and Humanities,
Kogi State University, P. M. B. 1008
Anyigba, Nigeria
[email protected]
Abstract
This paper examined nominal categories in Igala. The nominal categories that were handled by this article
include: number, possession, gender, definiteness and case. These play crucial role in all languages of the
world. In the method for the study, data collection included both primary and secondary sources. In the
primary source, the researcher selected two linguists in the department of Igala, Kogi State College of
Education Ankpa, as consultants in terms of getting the relevant data as regards nominal categories in
Igala. The secondary source included extant material on this subject done by other researchers in the past
both in Igala and other languages for purposes of enriching this work. Some of the findings of the study
include: (i) the Igala language has no gender distinction in its case grammar (pronoun) – thus we have the
third person singular subject pronouns i and òuŋ ( òŋʷu ), which are glossed ‘he/she/it’ as well as the third
person singular object pronoun uŋ ( ŋʷu ), also glossed him/her/it; (ii) definiteness in the language is
marked by demonstratives, which are of two types: proximate – jí ‘this’, and distal – lɛ́ ‘that’, while
indefiniteness is expressed through the use of the numeral ǒka ‘one’ or ‘someone’; (iii) four cases have
been established as used in day-to-day conversation in the Igala language, which are
nominative/subjective, accusative/objective, possessive/genitive, and vocative; and (iv) both ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ and
ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ or èbù
ɛ̀ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language but it is only ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀
‘man’ and èbù
ɛ̀ ‘woman’ that can take the plural marker or morpheme àbó - , while ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ and
ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ cannot. If we do, they lose their man/woman sense and evoke a different meaning
entirely, and therefore, become ungrammatical, as in * àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ would mean ‘people of the male folk, and
* àbonobùlɛ would mean ‘people of the female folk’.
Keywords: nominal category, number, possession, gender, definiteness, case.
Introduction
This paper investigated nominal groups in Igala. A nominal category belongs to the syntactic level of
linguistic description. It is a group of objects or ideas that can be collectively grouped on the basis of a
particular characteristic, that is, a qualitative property. A nominal category only has members and non-
members. In other words, nothing more can be said about the members of the group other than what they
are as parts of the group.
Igala is a language of the Yoruboid branch of the Defoid family, a sub-group of the Benue-Congo family
of the Kwa family, which belongs to the larger group of the Niger-Congo family, according to the tree of
the family of languages. The Yoruboid branch comprises the Yoruba, the Igala and the Itsekiri groups of
south-western Nigeria. According to Egbunu (2005:1) Igala land is demographically located within the
triangle formed by the confluence of the Rivers Niger and Benue. The Igala people are found east of the
confluence of these rivers. The land is bounded on the west by River Niger, on the east by Enugu State, the
south by Anambra State and on the north by Benue and Nassarawa States. It is 120 kilometres wide and
160 kilometres long. It is located approximately between latitudes 6’ 80° and 8’ north and longitudes 6’
30° and 7’ 40° east and covers an area of about 13, 665 square kilometres. As noted by Edimeh (2006:5),
Igala land is mostly rural but urbanisation has gradually set in. The major centres of population include
Idah, Ejule, Anyigba, Egwume̟, Dekina, Ankpa, Inye̟, Okpo and Abejukolo. The Igala people occupy the
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
Eastern Senatorial District of Kogi State, and out of the twenty-one Local Government Areas of the State,
Igala has nine.
Statement of the Research Problem
There have been few studies on this aspect of the syntax of this language, that is, nominal groups or
categories in Igala. By its current ninth (
th
) position among the Nigerian languages, the Igala language
should be replete with adequate studies not only morphologically, phonologically but also syntactically to
keep it lively in order to forestall endangerment, death or extinction. Owing to this, therefore, an extensive
knowledge aperture has been created which needs to be filled by both students and scholars in the field of
linguistics. It is against this backdrop that the researcher has resolved to embark on this research, which
also serves both as a supplement and complement to the existing few ones in Igala linguistics.
Literature Review
The review of literature under this section shall concentrate on the important concepts of this research,
which include number, possession, gender, definiteness and case, as contained in the topic: nominal
categories. The review will also capture empirical studies on topics related to this work carried out by
other researchers previously.
Conceptual Review
Chomsky (1965:170) observes that in a traditional grammar, a particular occurrence of a Noun would be
described in terms of its place in a system of paradigms defined by certain inflectional categories, namely
the categories of gender, number, case, and declensional type. Furthermore, Yule (1996:89) declares that in
addition to the terms used for the parts of speech, traditional grammatical analysis also gave us a number
of other categories which include number, gender, etc., adding that these categories can be discussed in
isolation, but their role in describing language structure becomes clearer when we consider them in terms
of agreement. In a similar development, Buch (2012:2) expresses that the ingredients or constituents of
nominal categories include the following: number, possession, gender, definiteness and case. We shall
discuss these one after the other.
According to Crystal (1991:335), number is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word-class to
display such contrasts as singular, plural, duality, triality, paucality, etc., as in English boy versus boys , he
walks versus they walk. Anagbogu (2011:109) has reported that the category of number is commonly
manifested in the distinction between singular and plural in relation to nouns. Brehm & Bock (2013:149)
proclaim that in many languages, English included, the notion of number is vital even when it is
immaterial to a speaker’s communicative intention, because the syntax of sentences requires it for setting
grammatical number: nouns and other words must be grammatically specified as either singular (e.g. dog )
or plural (e.g. dogs ), with no in-between options. Grammatical number in turn controls the necessary
operations of subject–verb agreement that speakers duly implement. Furthermore, Ejeba (2016:167)
testifies that number is a primary inherent grammatical category of nouns that is most widespread in the
languages of the world. In Igala, nouns are broadly classified into [+ANIMATE] and [-ANIMATE] nouns.
Whereas [+ANIMATE] nouns are nouns that designate living things, [-ANIMATE] nouns are those that
designate non-living things. Grammatical number is indicated differently for these two categories. In this
case, the morphemes àma - and àbó - are used for plural marking. This, indeed, is in tandem with
Williamson (1989) as cited in Ejeba (2016:167) that some Niger-Congo languages, of which Igala is one,
give primacy to animacy in that only human, relationship and agent nouns take an obligatory plural
marker. In Igala grammar, it is worthy of note to add here that reduplication is also used to modify nouns
in terms of number, especially that of plurality. It is actually a strategy for plural formation in Igala.
As reported by Crystal (1991:19), possession is a term used in grammatical analysis to refer to a type of
possessive relationship formally marked in some languages (such as Chinese). If a possessed item is seen
as having only a temporary or non-essential dependence on a possessor, it is said to be ‘alienable’, whereas
if its relationship to the possessor is a permanent or necessary one, it is inalienable. Moreover, Eastwood
(1994:175) posits that the possessive form of a noun expresses possession and other relation. In other
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
function, which refers back to something mentioned in the preceding discourse, and the other is a non-
anaphoric function, which refers to something not mentioned in the preceding discourse but whose
existence is something that the speaker assumes is known to the hearer.
Case , as reported by Crystal (1991:66), is a grammatical category used in the analysis of word-classes such
as noun and verb (or their associated phrases) to identify the syntactic relationship between words in a
sentence, through such contrasts as nominative, accusative, etc. According to Haspelmath (2006:1), the
term case is from Latin casus ‘fall(ing)’, which is a loan translation from Greek ptõsis ‘fall(ing)’ (cf. loan
translations in other languages such as German fall , Russian padež , from pad - ‘fall’). The idea seems to
have been that of “falling away from an assumed standard form”, and the terms declension (from
declinatio ‘turning away, deviation’) and inflection ( inflectio ‘bending’) are based on similar spatial
metaphors for meaningful formal variations in the shapes of words. The term case, therefore, can refer to
an inflectional category-system or to the individual inflectional categories or values of that system. In this
respect, case behaves like other inflectional category-systems such as tense, aspect, mood, person, number,
gender. Obviously, the function of cases is generally agreed to be that of "marking dependent nouns for the
type of relationship they bear to their heads", so that other nominal markings such as head marking for
person, head marking for possessedness, and NP marking for definiteness, topic or focus have never been
considered cases. Furthermore, Lyons (1968) as cited in Obiamalu (2016:1124) states that the term case is
a primitive concept in grammar. It originated from the Greek word ptois meaning ‘deviation’, which
translated into kasus in Latin. Therefore, the etymology of the word case has to do with ‘lexical deviation’.
In other words, the lexeme deviates from its normal form to reflect some grammatical relationships. This
idea gave rise to the use of case as a grammatical terminology. Further still, Obiamalu (2016:1125) reports
that the traditional grammar was interested only in the morphological inflections on nouns and based on
this, different case forms were identified. Thus, Latin for example has six case forms, which include:
Nominative, Accusative, Vocative, Genitive, Dative and Ablative. The nominative is the case associated
with the subject of the sentence, the accusative is used to mark the object of a transitive verb, the dative
marks the indirect object, the vocative is the case of address, the genitive is the case of possession, while
the ablative though with a variety of functions, mainly marks the instrument with which something is
done.
Empirical Review
Unmistakably, a number of studies on nominal categories that are relevant and related to the current
research have been undertaken previously both locally and internationally by other language scholars.
Some of them are outlined below:
Berkum (1996) undertook a research titled The Psycholinguistics of Grammatical Gender: Studies in
Language Comprehension and Production. In the study, the author introduces grammatical gender as a
phenomenon that does not normally draw too much attention to itself, but that nevertheless comes with
some very interesting psycholinguistic puzzles. In order to get a grip on these puzzles, the researcher first
laid out a general blueprint of the language user as he or she engages in speaking, listening, reading, and
writing, and then used it to introduce the two questions addressed in this work: (1) do native speakers of
Dutch make use of grammatical gender during word recognition, and (2) do they retrieve grammatical
gender during speech production in a way that suggests dedicated machinery for repeated retrieval? In the
methodology, the subjects chosen for the study were 48 native speakers of Dutch, recruited from the Max
Planck Institute, and the experimental items were 120 written monomorphemic count nouns with a single
gender, 60 de-words and 60 het-words, sampled from the CELEX lexical database of Dutch. Of the 60 de-
words, 24 were homonyms having at least two relatively unrelated meanings, e.g. ‘de bank’ (‘the bench’,
‘the bank’), and the remaining 36 were unambiguous, e.g. ‘de bijl’ (‘the axe’). Likewise, 24 of the 60 het-
words were homonyms, e.g. ‘het been’ (‘the leg’, ‘the bone’), and 36 were unambiguous, e.g. ‘het plein’
(‘the square’). All 120 nouns were mono- or bisyllabic, between 3 and 7 letters in length, and each
occurred in the INL corpus of written Dutch. One of the findings of the study had shown that the abstract
gender recency hypothesis cannot be correct. But the reason why we can go beyond a mere rejection of this
hypothesis is that its relatively non-unique claim also turned out to be wrong: experiments 4 and 5 clearly
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
showed that the retrieval of a noun’s grammatical gender did not benefit from recent access at all. This is
an interesting result, because, as already suggested, there are lots of reasons why we might expect the
retrieval of a noun’s grammatical gender to benefit from earlier retrieval.
Ravinski (2005) carried out a study entitled Grammatical Possession in Nuu-Chah-Nulth (a Southern
Wakashan language spoken in British Colombia in Canada). According to the researcher, the goal of this
study was to provide a syntactic analysis of possessive constructions in NCN. To do this, the researcher
adopted a broadly minimalist perspective of Chomsky (1995) and drew on primary data from native
speakers’ intuitions in addition to published sources, as part of its methodology. Elicited data came mainly
from speakers of the Ahousaht dialect, which is spoken on Flores Island, British Columbia. While doing
this, three types of possessive constructions were discussed. Viz: (i) possessed DPs (ii) possessed nominal
predicates (iii) possessor raising. From here, the researcher proposed for Nuu-chah-nulth that the
possessive morpheme corresponds to a possessive head in the functional architecture of either the DP or
clausal domain. Both the Possessive Phrase and a possessor DP are associated with a possessive feature.
Where the possessive marker is generated above a possessed subject DP, the possessor must be raised out
of it in order to check this feature. The study, in its conclusion, stated that the notion of “subject” is split
between at least two syntactic positions. Evidence illustrating clear subject-object asymmetries as well as
data suggesting A-movement of the possessor supports a configurational, rather than discourse-driven view
of Nuu-chah-nulth grammar.
Simonenko (20 13 ) embarked on a research titled Grammatical Ingredients of Definiteness. This research
presented arguments in favour of an explicit Logical Form representation of components responsible for
direct referentiality and domain restriction in definites, with a focus on Austro-Bavarian German, Standard
Swedish, and Standard Canadian English. The study provided a semantico-pragmatic analysis of the ban
on wh-subextraction out of DPs with the “strong” articles in Austro-Bavarian and demonstratives in
English which assumes their direct referentiality. The ungrammaticality of question formation is proposed
to result from the pathological uninformativeness of its possible answers. The ban on wh-subextraction
thus emerges as a new testing tool for direct referentiality. Furthermore, it proposed an analysis of the
cases where strong articles and demonstratives do not behave directly referentially. Assuming structural
decomposition of strong articles and demonstratives into a determiner head and a relational head, the writer
also proposed that directly referential interpretation results from a silent individual pronoun occupying the
specifier of the relational head, whereas co-varying interpretations arise as a result of either a restrictive
relative clause occupying this position, or else a relational noun functioning as the relational component
itself. From there, the writer proceeded to extend this approach to account for the distribution of strong and
weak definite articles in DPs with restrictive relative clauses. The conclusion of the study relied on, and
provided evidence for, the unavailability of either domain restriction at the NP-level or implicit global
restriction of the domain of individuals as a means of modelling the behaviour of Swedish definites.
Brehm & Bock (2013) conducted a research entitled What Counts in Grammatical Number Agreement?
According to the researchers, both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language
production. To explore their workings, they investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual
relatedness, produces variations in agreement. These agreement variations are open to competing notional
and lexical-grammatical number accounts. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number agreement
reflect differences in referential coherence: More coherence yields more singularity. The lexical-
grammatical hypothesis is that changes in agreement arise from competition between nouns differing in
grammatical number: More competition yields more plurality. These hypotheses make opposing
predictions about semantic integration. In the methodology, 100 experimental items were taken from
Solomon and Pearlmutter (2004) and there were four categories of items including 24 representational
items, 24 attribute/accompaniment items, 32 relative clause/subordinate clause items, and 20 functional
items. Every item had four versions, two integrated and two unintegrated, with the two versions of each
integration type having different local noun numbers, singular and plural. For the functional items,
Solomon and Pearlmutter created alternative integrated preambles that behaved similarly in their
experiments, so they quasi-randomly selected one of the two integrated forms for each of the 20 items,
balancing the incidence of the two original categories ( for and of ). The finding of the study showed that
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
person singular subject pronouns i and òu
ŋ ( ò
ŋ
ʷu
), which are glossed ‘he/she/it’ as well as the third
person singular object pronoun uŋ ( ŋʷu ), also glossed ‘him/her/it’. In addition to this, definiteness in the
language is marked by demonstratives, which are of two types: proximate – jí ‘this’, and distal - lɛ́ ‘that’.
Presentation of Data/Analysis
Data collection on the nominal categories of number, possession, gender, definiteness as well as case for
this research by the researcher is presented as follows:
(1) Number
Singular Gloss Plural Gloss
(1) a. ɛ́wɛ ‘bird’ àma-ɛwɛ ‘birds’
b. éwó ‘goat’ àma-ewó ‘goats’
c. éʤô ‘snake’ àma-eʤô ‘snakes’
d. àkpá ‘insect’ àma-àkpá ‘insects’
e. òɡi
ʤo ‘elder’ àbó-ó
ɡiʤo ‘elders’
f. òkóƖóbʲâ ‘young man’ àbó-ókóƖóbʲâ ‘young men’
g. ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘man/male’ àbó-ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘men/males’
h. èbùƖɛ̀ ‘woman/female’ àbó-ɛ̀bùƖɛ̀ ‘women/females’
i. úɲí ‘house’ úɲí-uɲí ‘houses’
j. égbé ‘grass’ égbé-egbé ‘grasses’
k. áʧíkʷû ‘bone’ áʧíkʷû - aʧíkʷû ‘bones’
l. úwó ‘mountain’ úwó-uwó ‘mountains’
Notice that both àmá - and àbó - plural markers are used in 1(a)-(h) above. In 1(a)-(d), àmá - is used while
in 1(e)-(h), àbó - is used, and both markers are a group of [+ANIMATE] nouns, which usually designates
living things. Furthermore, while àmá - can be used with both [+HUMAN] and [-HUMAN] nouns, àbó - is
exclusively used with [+HUMAN] nouns only. Then in 1(i)-(l), we can see clearly how reduplication is
used as a strategy for plural formation in this language. Furthermore, in the plural form of 1(a)-(h), the last
vowels of the plural morphemes ( àmá - and àbó - ) and those of the nouns they precede are usually not
written the way they in the language, and either of them (the one after the morpheme or the one preceding
the noun) is deleted under a fast speech situation. Thus we have: àmɛwɛ ‘birds’, àmewó ‘goats’, , àmâkpá
‘insects’, àmeʤo ‘snakes’, àbókɛ́Ɩɛ ‘men/males’, àbóbúƖɛ ‘women/females’, etc. Observe that both ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀
and ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ or èbùƖɛ̀ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language. However, it is
only ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘man’ and èbùƖɛ̀ ‘woman’ that can take the plural marker or morpheme àbó - , as shown above,
while ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ cannot. If we do, they lose their man/woman sense and evoke a
different meaning entirely, and therefore, become ungrammatical, as in àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ would mean ‘people of
the male folk, and àbonobùlɛ would mean ‘people of the female folk’ respectively.
(2) Possession
Person Number Possession Gloss
st
Singular
Plural
ě=mi
ě=wa
‘mine/my’
‘ours/our’
nd
Singular
Plural
ě=wɛ
ě=mɛ
‘yours/your(sg)’
‘yours/your(pl)’
rd
Singular
Plural
ě=ŋʷu
ě=ma
‘his/hers/its’
‘theirs/their’
(Culled from Ejeba, 2016:188).
A careful look at the second data above shows that possession in Igala is indicated by pronouns, which are
divided into 1
st
person singular and plural, 2
nd
person singular and plural as well as 3
rd
person singular and
plural forms. Notice that the possessive pronoun ě=ŋ
ʷu ‘his/hers/its’ does not distinguish between male
and female in this language, and as such, it is appropriate in use with both (i.e. male and female gender).
(3) Gender
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
It has been established that Igala has no gender distinction in its case grammar, specifically the pronouns.
Nonetheless, the common nouns in the language, which comprise [+ANIMATE] and [+HUMAN] ones
actually display gender distinction, as exemplified by the data below:
(3) Gender Igala Gloss
(i) Masculine → a. ɛ́nɛkɛ̀lɛ ‘man’
b. ɔ́kɔ ‘husband’
c. òbúkɔ ‘he-goat
d. òkólób
a ‘boy/young man’.
(ii) Feminine → a. ónobùlɛ ‘woman’
b. ɔ́ja ‘wife’
c. áʤúwɛ ‘hen’
d. éwó ‘goat’.
(iii) Common → a. ákɔ́ʧɛ ‘learner’
b. áʧukɔlɔ ‘worker’
c. ákáʤɔ ‘judge’
d. ɔ́ma ‘child’.
(iv) Neuter → a. òkʷúta ‘stone’
b. úwó ‘mountain’
c. ɔ̀tákáda ‘book’
d. úɲí ‘house’.
Taking a careful consideration of the third data above, it is obvious that the masculine, feminine, common
and neuter genders are attested in the Igala language. The masculine gender category includes all males
both humans and animals, as exemplified in 3(i) a-d; the feminine gender category includes all females
both humans and animals, as shown in 3(ii) a-d; the nouns that belong to the common gender category are
either males or females but they are not distinguished, as displayed in 3(iii) a-d; and the neuter gender
category includes all nouns to which maleness or femaleness does not apply, as depicted in 3(iv) a-d, all in
the above data.
(4) Definiteness
On one hand, definiteness in Igala is marked or realised by the use of demonstratives, usually referred to as
demonstrative pronouns or demonstrative adjectives or demonstrative determiners or demonstrative clitics.
Normally, demonstratives are used by the speaker to demonstrate, show or display something specific, near
or far to the hearer. They are of two types in Igala: proximate and distal. A proximate demonstrative is
used by the speaker to display something near to the hearer while a distal demonstrative is used to display
something far away from the speaker to the hearer. The fourth data below shows this as exemplified by
Ejeba (2016:191):
Demonstrative Demonstrative Demonstrative Gloss
( type ) ( clitic ) ( case )
a. Proximate ji ‘this’ ě=ji ‘this one’
b. Distal lɛ ‘that’ ě=lɛ ‘that one’.
On the other hand, indefiniteness in Igala is expressed by the use of what is popularly referred to as
numeral ǒka glossed ‘one’ or ‘someone’. It actually denotes lack of background knowledge of what is
referred to by both the speaker and the hearer. The use of the numeral one as an indefinite article has been
attested in some languages of the world, of which Igala is one. This is illustrated by the second part of the
fourth data below:
(i) ɛ́nɛ ǒka á wa jì
who one BE come DEM
Someone is coming.
(ii) ɛ́nɛ ǒka á lo jì
who one BE go DEM
Someone is going.
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
ǒka á lo lɛ̀ ‘Someone is going’, as any of these sentences could refer to one or someone who is coming or
going that is near or far away from the speaker/addresser or the addressee respectively; (ii) the nominative
or subjective comprises òmi ‘I’ (1sg), ùwɛ ‘you’ (2sg), òuŋ ‘he/she/it’ (3sg), àwa ‘we’ (1pl), àmɛ or mɛ
‘you’ (2pl) and àma or ma ‘they’ (3pl) all belong to the grammatical class of pronoun, and they always
occupy the subject position of a sentence in Igala. However, they can appear at the object position of a
sentence when used with the accusative ŋʷu , and when this happens, òmi ‘I’ (1sg) becomes ‘me’, e.g. Du
ŋʷu ómi ‘Give me’; òuŋ ‘he/she/it’ (3sg) becomes ‘him/her’, e.g. Du ŋʷu òuŋ ‘Give him/her’; àwa ‘we’
becomes ‘us’, e.g. Du
ŋʷu áwa ‘Give us’; àmɛ or mɛ ‘you’ (2pl) becomes ‘you’ (subject), e.g. Í du
ŋʷu ámɛ
ń (neg.)? ‘Didn’t he/she give you? or Ì du
ŋʷu m ɛ ‘He/she gave you’; and àma or ma ‘they’ (3pl) becomes
‘them’, e.g. Ì du
ŋʷu áma ‘He/she gave them’ or Du
ŋʷu ma ‘Give them’; (iii) the assertion that Igala does
not have male/female distinction is only applicable to certain pronouns and not the nouns, especially the
common ones (nouns), which comprise [+ANIMATE] and [+HUMAN] in the language; (iv) that both
ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ and ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ or èbù
ɛ̀ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language but it is
only ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘man’ and èbù
ɛ̀ ‘woman’ that can take the plural marker or morpheme àbó - , while ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ
‘man’ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ cannot. If we do, they lose their man/woman sense and evoke a different
meaning entirely, and therefore, become ungrammatical, as in àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ would mean ‘people of the male
folk, and àbonobùlɛ would mean ‘people of the female folk’; and (v) four cases have been established as
used in day-to-day conversation in the Igala language, which are nominative/subjective,
accusative/objective, possessive/genitive, and vocative.
Conclusion
This paper which examined nominal categories in Igala treated five nominal categories which included:
number, possession, gender, definiteness and case. It is true that these are not all the nominal categories in
Igala but the researcher has resolved to focus on these five to be able to, to some extent, do justice to them
in such a way that new discoveries could be made from them. Therefore, further investigation can be made
into other categories by other linguists. Considering the clarity of the data presented, we have seen that
rather than a duplication of the existing works, this research has thrown more lights on the five nominal
categories handled in this study.
Contribution to Knowledge
The new discoveries made from this research that one , both ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ and ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ or èbùƖɛ̀ and ónobùlɛ
‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language but it is only ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘man’ and èbùƖɛ̀ ‘woman’ that can
take the plural marker or morpheme àbó - , while ɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘man’ and ónobùlɛ ‘woman’ cannot. If we do,
they lose their man/woman sense and evoke a different meaning entirely, and therefore, become
ungrammatical, as in àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ would mean ‘people of the male folk, and àbonobùlɛ would mean ‘people
of the female folk’; two , when definiteness expressed by the demonstratives ji ‘this’ (proximate) and lɛ
‘that’ (distal) are used with the numeral ǒka ‘one’ or ‘someone’, the proximate/distal disparity is
eradicated, as in Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á wa jì ‘Someone is coming’ or Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á wa lɛ̀ ‘Someone is coming’; Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á
lo jì ‘Someone is going’ or Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á lo lɛ̀ ‘Someone is going’, as any of these sentences could refer to one
or someone who is coming or going that is near or far away from the speaker/addresser or the addressee
respectively; and three , when the nominative/subjective òmi ‘I’ (1sg), ùwɛ ‘you’ (2sg), òu
ŋ ‘he/she/it’
(3sg), àwa ‘we’ (1pl), àmɛ or mɛ ‘you’ (2pl), and àma or ma ‘they’ (3pl), which normally appear at the
subject position of a sentence are used with the accusative ŋʷu , the following become the case: òmi ‘I’
(1sg) becomes ‘me’, e.g. Du ŋʷu ómi ‘Give me’; òuŋ ‘he/she/it’ (3sg) becomes ‘him/her’, e.g. Du ŋʷu òuŋ
‘Give him/her’; àwa ‘we’ becomes ‘us’, e.g. Du ŋʷu áwa ‘Give us’; àmɛ or mɛ ‘you’ (2pl) becomes ‘you’
(subject), e.g. Í du ŋʷu ámɛ ń (neg.)? ‘Didn’t he/she give you? or Ì du ŋʷu mɛ ‘He/she gave you’; and àma
or ma ‘they’ (3pl) becomes ‘them’, e.g. Ì du ŋʷu áma ‘He/she gave them’ or Du ŋʷu ma ‘Give them’,
among others, are indeed, a tremendous contribution to the knowledge of linguistics. Furthermore, this
study will continue to be a reference material to both scholars and students of linguistics in particular and
language enthusiasts in general. In addition, the study is obviously an addition to the existing ones in the
field of language and linguistics. Finally, this research, no doubt, is somewhat a pattern to linguists who
(ISSN: 2276-8645)
would like to carry out similar study in other languages of the world at any time from one generation to
another.
References
Anagbogu, P. N. ( 2011 ). Introduction to morphology in NSUK TEXTS in General Linguistics. G.S.
Omachonu (eds). Volume 1. A Publication of the Department of Languages and Linguistics,
Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
Berkum, J. J. A. ( 1996 ). The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language
comprehension and product. Nijmegen University Press, Nijmegen, Netherland.
Brehm, L. and Bock, K. ( 2013 ). What counts in grammatical number agreement. ELSEVIER, Cognition.
Buch, A. W. ( 2012 ). Nominal categories. Retrieved from: http://www.sfs.uni-
tuebingen.de/~abuch/12ws/lotw08.pdf. 2
nd
February, 2019.
Chomsky, N. ( 1965 ). Aspects of the theory of syntax. The M.I.T. Press. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Cambridge.
Eastwood, J. ( 1994 ). Oxford guide to English grammar. Oxford University Press.
Edimeh, F. O. ( 2006 ). The legacies of Atta Ayegba Om’Idoko: A concise history of Igala land. 1.
CUCA Communications.
Egbunu, F. E. ( 2001 ). Chieftaincy titles among Igala: Problems and prospects for Christians. Snaap Press.
Ltd, Enugu.
Ejeba, O. S. ( 2016 ). A grammar of Igala. PhD Thesis. University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt.
Gadilia, K. ( 2013 ). A typological study of (in)definiteness in the Iranian languages. Institute for Bible
Translation. Retrieved from: file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/definiteness07.07.2009.pdf. 9th
February, 201 9.
Haspelmath, M. ( 2006 ). Terminology of case_._ In A. Malchukov & A. Spencer (eds.). Handbook of Case.
Oxford University Press.
Kirkpatrick, B. ( 2007 ). Better English. Geddes & Grosset, David Dale House, New Lanark, Scotland.
Kirtchuk, P. ( 2004 ). Definiteness. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Routledge.
Love, N. (1986). The linguistic thought of J. R. Firth. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics. 15, 31 - 60.
Retrieved from: file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/116505- 323575 - 1 - SM.pdf. 26th January, 2019.
Ravinski, C. ( 2005 ). Grammatical possession in Nuu-Chah-Nulth. MA Thesis. The University of British
Colombia. Retrieved from: https://depts.washington.edu/wll2/files/ravinski_05_ma.pdf. 8th
February, 2019.
Simonenko, A. P. ( 2013 ). Grammatical ingredients of definiteness. PhD Thesis. McGill University
Montreal, Quebec. Retrieved from:
http://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~alexandra.simonenko/SimonenkoPhDthesis.pdf. 8th
February, 2019.
Yule, G. ( 2007 ). The study of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
