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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 unubi4u@gmail.com

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 ‘this’, and distal – lɛ́ ‘that’, while indefiniteness is expressed through the use of the numeralǒka‘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’ orèbùƖɛ̀and ónobùlɛ‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language but it is onlyɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ ‘man’ and èbùƖɛ̀ ‘woman’ that can take the plural marker or morpheme àbó-, whileɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ ‘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 *àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛwould mean ‘people of the male folk, and *àbonobùlɛwould 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.

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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 (9th) 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.

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words, the possessive form of a noun is an asymmetric relationship between constituents, the referent of one of which (the possessor) in some sense possesses (or owns, has a part of, rules over, etc.) the referent of the other (the possessed). In addition, the possessive form of a noun is used to show ownership or possession and may be shown by using the preposition “of”, for example, The roof of the house. This essentially indicates that the “roof” belongs to the “house”. However, the possessive is more commonly shown in English by using an apostrophe.In this case, the phrase “of the house” can be replaced by the possessive form of the noun“house’s”. When this occurs, the order of nouns is reversed, so the possessive noun comes first: thehouse’sroof. In some languages of the world like Anishinaabemowin (a language of the Anishinaabe people spoken in North America), relationships between nouns described as ‘possession’ are communicated by means of prefixes and suffixes which are usually attached to nouns. The prefixes and suffixes are attached to the possessed noun. The prefixes specify the person of the possessor, and the suffixes specify plural number of the possessor, and that which is possessed.

Yule (1996:89) states that gender helps us describe the agreement between a noun and its referent in a sentence, e.g. boy and his. According to him, this relationship is described in terms of natural gender, mainly derived from a biological distinction between male and female. The agreement between boy and his is based on a distinction English makes between reference to male entities (he, his), female entities (she, her) and sexless entities, or animals, when the sex of the animal is irrelevant. However, agreement between a noun and its referent in a sentence, e.g. boy and his, as expressed by the scholar above, does not apply in the Igala language. As expressed by Kirkpatrick (2007:81-2), we call it gender when nouns are grouped according to the natural distinctions of sex, or, where appropriate, absence of sex. Thus we have the gender categories of masculine, feminine and neuter. In this case, a boy or man is classified as masculine, a girl or woman is classified as feminine and a table or chair as neuter. Some nouns in English such as child, doctor, adult, architect, etc. can either refer to a male or female, unless the sex is indicated in the context. According to her, many languages such as French and German are affected by the concept of grammatical gender. Thus in French the word hill is feminine according to grammatical gender, although in gender in the real world it would be neuter. Similarly, the German word for a mountain (der Berg) is masculine in terms of grammatical gender, although in the real world it is neuter. Buck (2012:59) quotes Corbett (2011) as saying that in Kannada (a Dravidian and an official language of the State of Karnataka, Southern India), nouns denoting male humans are masculine, while those denoting female humans are feminine. There are also deities, demons and heavenly bodies in these genders. All remaining nouns, including those denoting infants and animals, are neuter. Thus appa‘father’, andcandra‘moon’ are masculine,amma‘mother’ is feminine, and na:yi‘dog’ is neuter.

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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 wordcase 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:

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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.

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semantic integration affects agreement in ways that require a different explanation. Semantic integration reflects basic features of the mental representations of events and objects in the world, and how speakers enumerate objects within those representations. What emerges from this enumeration, notional number, lays the groundwork for grammatical number and its role in the fortunes and misfortunes of grammatical agreement.

Obiamalu (2016) carried out a research titledThe Notion of ‘Case’ from Traditional Grammar to Modern Grammatical Theories: A Critical Historical Review. According the researcher, the notion of case has been a controversial one, yet the grammatical terminology has survived right from traditional Grammar to the current grammatical theories. This work critically examined the notion of case within different grammatical frameworks. His interest was mainly on the role of syntax and semantics in case determination and the level of grammatical analysis (deep or surface) at which case is assigned. The study looked at the notion of case as conceived in traditional grammar, and then explored how the concept has been adapted to antecedent grammatical theories up to the Principles and parameters theory. In conclusion, the writer had been able to show that the notion of case has been conceived in different ways in the different grammatical frameworks. The points of disagreement are whether case is syntactically as well as semantically relevant and whether case is a base structure or surface structure phenomenon. Traditional grammar accepts that case is syntactically as well as semantically relevant but applicable only to surface structure and must show some morphological reflexes. Aspects model of generative grammar agrees with traditional grammar in saying that case is only applicable in the surface but differs in proposing that case is governed by some rules of various kinds of deep and surface syntactic relations.

Theoretical Framework

This study is hinged onFirth’s theory of descriptive linguistics, which was first propounded in 1951.Firth (1951) as cited in Love (1986:31) declares that the business of linguistics is to describe language. She further comments that Firth takes linguistics to be primarily concerned with the speech-events themselves, and dealing with speech-events would involve the systematic deployment of analytical constructs and categories, which may in practice turn out to be rather similar to the constructs and categories involved in the analysis of abstract systems underlying speech-events. In a clearer perspective, descriptive linguistics is a study of a language, its structure, and its rules as they are used in daily life by its speakers from all walks of life, including standard and nonstandard varieties; that is, descriptive linguistics describes the language, its structure, and the syntactic rules that govern sentence and phrase constructions. Importantly, the concept of descriptive analysis is, in principle, applicable to any set of data, provided that these data represent the actual usage of a language under study at a given time in a given speech community.

From the preceding discussion, it is obvious that descriptive theory perfectly fits into the current study. This is because in this research, we will describe lucidly how nominal categories of number, possession, gender, definiteness and case operate in the Igala language. And as a matter of fact, such description can never be complete, valid and reliable without the use of data. This is because data is considered as a tool with which linguists analyse or describe any language or its use by a particular speech community scientifically with a view to arriving at valid conclusions.

Methodology

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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’. In addition to this, definiteness in the language is marked by demonstratives, which are of two types: proximate–‘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. òɡiʤo ‘elder’ àbó-óɡiʤo ‘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 bothɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀ andɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ‘man’ orèbùƖɛ̀and ónobùlɛ‘woman’ are used interchangeably in the language. However, it is onlyɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀‘man’and èbùƖɛ̀‘woman’that can take the plural marker or morpheme àbó-, as shown above, whileɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ‘man’ andónobùlɛ‘woman’ cannot. If we do, they lose their man/woman sense and evoke a different meaning entirely, and therefore, become ungrammatical, as in àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛwould mean ‘people of the male folk, and àbonobùlɛwould mean ‘people of the female folk’ respectively.

(2) Possession

Person Number Possession Gloss

1st Singular

Plural

ě=mi ě=wa

‘mine/my’ ‘ours/our’

2nd Singular

Plural

ě=wɛ ě=mɛ

‘yours/your(sg)’ ‘yours/your(pl)’

3rd 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 1stperson singular and plural, 2ndperson singular and plural as well as 3rdperson singular and plural forms. Notice that the possessive pronoun ě=ŋʷu ‘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).

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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. òkólóbʲa ‘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.

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(iii) ɛ́nɛ ǒka á wa lɛ̀ who one BE come DEM Someone is coming.

(iv) ɛ́nɛ ǒka á lo lɛ̀ who one BE go DEM Someone is going.

As one considers the second part of the fourth data above, the demonstrative ji ‘that’ in 4(i) and (ii) signifies proximate, while that of lɛ ‘that’ in 4(iii) and (iv) denotes distal. However, when used with the numeral ǒka ‘one’ or ‘someone’, the proximate/distal disparity is usually eliminated in the language. Consequently, if one says:Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á wa jì‘Someone is coming’ orƐ́nɛ ǒka á wa lɛ̀‘Someone is coming’; Ɛ́nɛ ǒka á lo jì‘Someone is going’ orƐ́nɛ ǒka á lo lɛ̀‘Someone is going’, 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.

(5) Case

Grammatical Class Case Gloss Description

Pronoun òmi, ùwɛand òuŋ

àwa, àmɛand àma or ma

‘I’, ‘you’ & ‘he/she/it’ ‘we’, ‘you(pl)’, ‘they’

Nominative/Subjective

Pronoun ŋʷu andŋʷu má ‘him/her/it’ and ‘them’ Accusative/Objective

Pronoun (POSS) ě=mi

ě=wa ě=wɛ ě=mɛ ě=ŋʷu ě=ma

‘mine/my(1sg)’ ‘ours/our(1pl)’ ‘yours/your(2sg)’ ‘yours/your(2pl)’ ‘his/hers/its(3sg)’ ‘theirs/their(3pl)’

Possessive/Genitive

Noun Àtábɔ, Òʧùmâ, Álewò,

Ébúné, etc.

‘any Igala name

addressed’

Vocative

As seen from the fifth and last data above, it is established that Igala has four cases: the nominative or subjective comprises òmi ‘I’ (1sg),ùwɛ‘you’ (2sg), òuŋ‘he/she/it’ (3sg), àwa‘we’ (1pl), àmɛor mɛ ‘you’ (2pl) and àma or ma‘they’ (3pl) allbelong to the grammatical class of pronoun, and they always occupy the subject position of a sentence in Igala. Notwithstanding, they can appear at the object position of a sentence when used with the accusativeŋʷu. But when this happens, the following become the case: òmi‘I’ (1sg) becomes ‘me’, e.g.Du ŋʷuómi‘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 duŋʷu ámɛ ń (neg.)?‘Didn’t he/she give you? orÌ duŋʷu mɛ‘He/she gave you’; and àma or ma‘they’ (3pl) becomes ‘them’, e.g.Ì duŋʷu áma‘He/she gave them’ or Duŋʷu ma ‘Give them’.The accusative or objective comprisesŋʷu ‘him/her/it’ andŋʷu má‘them’ also belong to the grammatical class of pronoun. Similarly, notice that maas seen above means ‘they’ butin order to mean ‘them’, it must be used withŋʷu, just as shown above. It often appears at the object position of a sentence in the language. Then the possessive or genitive, which comprises all the possessive forms of pronoun, are used to express or indicate possession, as clearly shown by the data. In addition, they can occupy the initial, medial and final positions of a sentence in this language. Lastly, the vocative is used in Igala when the noun is the name of a person spoken to or addressed. So, any Igala name being addressed or spoken to in a conversation is said to be in the vocative case.

Findings the Research

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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),àmɛor 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 accusativeŋʷu, and when this happens, òmi‘I’ (1sg) becomes ‘me’, e.g.Du ŋʷuómi ‘Give me’;òuŋ‘he/she/it’ (3sg) becomes ‘him/her’, e.g. Du ŋʷu òuŋ ‘Give him/her’;àwa‘we’ becomes ‘us’,e.g. Duŋʷuáwa‘Give us’; àmɛor mɛ‘you’ (2pl) becomes ‘you’ (subject), e.g.Í duŋʷuámɛ ń (neg.)?‘Didn’t he/she give you? orÌ duŋʷu mɛ‘He/she gave you’; andàma or ma‘they’ (3pl)becomes ‘them’, e.g.Ì duŋʷu áma‘He/she gave them’ orDuŋʷu 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 ɛ̀kɛ̀Ɩɛ̀andɛ́nɛkɛ̀Ɩɛ‘man’ orèbùƖɛ̀and 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 àbɛnɛkɛ̀Ɩɛwould mean ‘people of the male folk, and àbonobùlɛwould 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

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would like to carry out similar study in other languages of the world at any time from one generation to another.

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