Aspects of the Lexical Semantics of Urhobo
Chapter One
PURPOSE OF STUDY
To the best of my knowledge, there are not many studies on lexical semantics. Hence this project was carried out with the aim of proving and identifying some of the existence of lexical relations in the language, with the objectivity to;
i) shade more light on the aspect of lexical semantic relations and negation
ii) distinguish semantically the notion of lexical negations (marked or unmarked)
iii)show how meanings of words are interrelated in the language
iv) show the different senses of words in the language
v) Give examples of senses of words that are used in different context
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
Preamble
This chapter reviews other works that are related to this research. The chapter is divided into three parts; the first presents a review of related literature conceptually, the second focuses on the previous studies done in the area while the third centres on the theoretical framework, followed by a chapter summary.
Conceptual Review
This part reviews various related topics that range from Sociolinguistics, the concept of Language and society, Dialectology, Sociolinguistic concept of Dialect, Regiolect, Idiolect, Isoglossses, Mutual intelligibility, Standardization, and Speech communities and few other areas worthy of consideration.
Concept of Language
Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. Sapir (1921) There are two terms in this definition that calls for discussion: human and non-instinctive. Language, as Sapir rightly pointed out, is human. Only human‟s posses‟ language and all normal humanbeing uniformly possess it. Animals do have a communicative system but it is not a developedsystem. That is why language is said to be species-specific and species uniform. Also,language does not pass from a parent to a child. In this sense, it is non-instinctive. A child hasto learn the language of the society he/she is placed in.Syal and Jindal (2008: 3) states that “everybody knows the answer to this question but nobodyhas so far been able to come out with any standard definition that fully explain the termlanguage”. Syal and Jindal (ibid) language is a very important form of communicationbetween human that is difficult to think of a society without language.
Firdaus (2014) opinesthat the existence of language cannot be separated from human life, even though it is obviousthat all activities related to interaction among people necessitate a language. According tohim, language is the most valuable asset of any society and members of a communityunderstand each other through the use of language. For O‟Grady and Dobrosvolky (1989: 1)“language is many things; it can be a system of communication, a medium for expression, amatter for political disagreement and a catalyst for nation building”. According to Brooks andWarren (1972), language is the most important means of communication in the humansociety, and man is regarded as the animal with language, the symbol-making animal.Hall (1969) opines that “language is the institution whereby humans communicate andinteract with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols”. Thisdefinition rightly gives more prominence to the fact that language is primarily speechproduced by oral-auditory symbols. A speaker produces some string of oral sounds that getconveyed through the air to the listener who through his hearing organs, receives the soundwave conveys these to the brain that interprets these symbols to arrive at a meaning.Furthermore, Hall In (1978) sees language as “the institution whereby human communicateand interact with each other by means of habitually used oral auditory arbitrary symbols.”10Implied in Hall‟s definition is the fact that language is a conglomeration of different socialgroups‟ needs or desires using conventional and arbitrary sounds to communicate.Matthews (2007), define language as “a phenomenon of vocal and written communicationamong human beings generally.”
According to Bloch and Trager (1942) “a language is asystem of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperate”communication”.Gimson (1980:4-5) describes language as:a system of conventional symbols used for communication by a community, the pattern of conventions covers a system of significant sound units, the inflection and the arrangement of words and the association of meaning with words.The Zaar language used a conventional sound system for communication in its community,but most of its sounds and lexical terms can have more than one meaning which can bedifferentiated by the context of discussion. The lexical term „mirr‟ is a good example; itmeans „pomade‟ or „thief‟, therefore, the arrangement of words does not affect Zaar (Sayawa)language. Similarly, to this the definition of language by Osisanwo (2008:1):
Language is a human vocal noise or the arbitrary graphic representation of this noise, used systematically and conventionally by members of a speech community for the purpose of communication.Both definitions above prominently point out that language is a system. Sounds join togetherto form words according to a system. These definitions are therefore preferred in the light ofthe topic considered for this research for the simple fact that it covers the aspect of languageas a system comprising Lexicon, Syntax, Semantics as well as the role of language use byindividuals in speech community, therefore the above definition is considered as a working definition for this research.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NOUN PHRASE
Introduction
In the previous chapter, I attempted a description of the dependent constituents of an NP. This chapter will discuss the different types of NP constructions, case and agreement in the NP and nominal morphology in Urhobo. Fewer examples would be required in this section because we have already come across some of these NP types in the examples given in the previous section.
Types of NPs
This section explores all possible types on NPs in the Urhobo.
Full or complete NP
This term is what I have used to refer to NPs containing all of the constituents discussed above. In actual speech, this is very rare but it would help in understanding the ordering of the structures in the language.
(1)a. é-shárè yònyònvwín íyónrìn r(é) á mrènré (ò)-nà éjé
PL.N-man handsome five AM 2PL.NOM see.PAST SG-DEF all ‘all the five handsome men that we saw’
ó-shárè (ó)-grón-grò r(é)-ó ó-gbá r(é)-ó yònrón ú-m-úrhé (ò)-nà
SG.N-man SG-tall AM-3SG SG-garden AM-3SG hold.PROG SG.N-small-tree SG-DEF ‘the tall man in the garden who is holding a stick’
The ordering of the constituents of the NP is as follows: noun (adjective/numeral) (prepositional adjunct) (relative clause) (determiner) (quantifier)
The second position can be occupied by either an adjective or a numeral. The brackets show that all other elements of the NP except the head noun are optional.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘RẸ’ AS A PROCLITIC ASSOCIATIVE MARKER
Introduction
This short chapter takes a critical view of the Urhobo AM, ‘rẹ’ and argues first, that it is a proclitic and then, that it is an associative marker. Although Welmers (1969) and Aziza (2002) have already suggested that ‘rẹ’ is an associative marker, they have not attempted to provide any evidence for their claims. In this chapter, I will present the different possible constructions in which the ‘rẹ’ is used and its different functions in each of these constructions, then reach a conclusion that ‘rẹ’ is not a word or a prefix but a clitic with an associative function.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
This chapter summarizes the findings of this work and states the implications of such findings. In this study, I ‘dissected’ the Urhobo NP in order to thoroughly describe its component parts, then I analysed the NP as a whole entity. Some of the salient findings are restated here. Urhobo, like its siblings from the West Benue Congo family is a noun-prefixing, exclusively prepositional, noun-head initial language, with nearly all noun modifiers occurring post-nominally and agreeing with the noun. PPs and RCs also modify the NP and the NP can be a CC. RCs are externally-headed (headless relatives not allowed) and are introduced by a relativizer.
Urhobo pronoun system comprises three persons and cases, and two numbers. The third person singular ‘o’ is also used as the impersonal one in ordinals, locatives and derived nominals. It has six morphological processes; affixation being the most common. In morphological typology, Urhobo seems satisfied with a central position. It is not an isolating language and not a polysynthetic language; it is somewhat fusional and somewhat agglutinative. The smallest lexical (as opposed to grammatical) word class is adjectives, which are mostly derived from verbs and nouns. Adjectives are compared by particles and not affixes. They are verb encoded in predicative positions. Derivational morphology is also used to form nouns. Urhobo is one of the few languages with both diminutives and augmentatives.
Gender is not marked in Urhobo so the main types of agreement are number and person (in pronouns) agreement. Agreement occurs between the noun and its dependents and the pronoun and its antecedents but not between the NP and verb. Urhobo has a nominative-accusative case and a genitive case but no oblique case. Payne (1997: 31) differentiates between languages that mark the relationship between a head and a dependent on the head, and languages that do so on the dependent. Urhobo is a dependent-marking language which most times cliticizes ‘re’ to the dependent. Lastly, the importance of the clitic AM ‘re’ cannot be undermined.
The findings above are consistent with Williamson’s (1968 & 1970a) and Elugbe’s (1973) classification of Urhobo as an Edoid language of the Benue-Congo family of the Niger-Congo phylum because the above features are shared by other languages at the different levels of classification; with the shared features increasing as the language family becomes smaller. Watters (2000: 194-230) and Dimmendaal (2000: 161-193) comparative syntax and morphology (respectively) of African languages further confirm these similarities. However, it was also observed, in the course of this study, that Urhobo shares some properties with languages like English, French, Hungarian, Choctaw, Burmese, Chukchi, etc, with which it has no ancestral ties. The implication is that language is a universal phenomenon and it is innately human. Hockett (1963: 1) defined linguistics as the branch of science devoted to the discovery of the place of human language in the universe. This study shows that every language is different yet every language has something in common with at least one other language.
Finally, no work is perfect and this one is no exception. Limited by lack of Microsoft symbols for some of the phonetic symbols in Urhobo, I could only give the conventional spellings of the words with no emphasis on their correct pronunciations even in cases of homographs. Also for this study, other than some secondary data, I solely relied on given information about what Urhobo speakers say, instead of actually being present to hear the speakers say those things. I strongly recommend direct communication with ordinary, native speakers for future research on this language. Future research could also look into how meanings are arrived out (semantics) in Urhobo. An analysis of Urhobo against the backdrop of syntactic theories like x-bar and minimalist, would also be desirable. With majority of African languages still under-described and facing extinction, the importance of further research, not just on Urhobo but on African languages, for descriptive, comparative and theoretical purposes cannot be overemphasized.
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