AFFIXATION IN URHOBO Philip O. EKIUGBO Midwest Language Research Centre Ughelli, Delta State. GSM: +234 (0) 7062851103 E_mail: oghenesuowho@gmail ABSTRACT Affixation is a morphological process which involves the attachment of a dependent morpheme called affix, to an independent morpheme. It is one of the common morphological process in Urhobo and other languages of the world. Urhobo is an Edoid language spoken by the Urhobo people, an ethnic nationality which inhabits the western part of Delta state in southern Nigeria. The language belongs to the Benue-Congo language group, a branch of Niger-Congo language family. It is spoken as mother tongue by about two million native speakers and as L2 by a handful of non-native speakers. This paper investigates five processes of Affixation in Urhobo, with a view to analysing the concepts, its structures and its functions in the language. These processes are: Prefixation, Suffixation, Circumfixation, Simulfixation and Suprafixation. Affixation in Urhobo, like in other languages, may either be inflectional and/or derivational. An affix is said to act as Inflection when it marks such phenomenon as tense, number, polarity, case etc or as derivation when it alters the meaning and/or the word-class of the word to which it is attached. The work begins with definitions of relevant terms and concepts. This is followed by the theoretical frameworks used. The main section deals with presentation and analysis of data. KEYWORDS: Affixation, Affix, Prefixation, Suffixation, Circumfixation, Simulfixation, Suprafixation, Inflection, Derivation.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:00:46 +0000
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