CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Languages have ways of forming new words. Word formation is a significant area of linguistic studies. Prasad identifies nine processes of word formation in English which include: compounding, duplication, derivation, back formation, conversion, clipping, acronym, blending and multiple formations (64). The concern of this work is on derivation of nouns from verbs which is within the tenets of derivational morphology.

Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words and of the systematic form-meaning correspondences between words (Booij 22). Derivation is a morphological process that results in the formation of new lexemes which is achieved through affixation, according to Lyons quoted in Bauer (27). Generally, derivation in linguistics is a process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word. This could be from any word class to another. But we are interested in how nouns are derived from verbs. For instance, from ‘govern’ and ‘fail’, we derive ‘government’ and ‘failure’ respectively. It, therefore, stands in contrast to inflection which forms grammatical variants of the same word as with determine/determines/determining/ determined (Crystal 138).

The fact that there exist different languages in the world is a clear pointer and indication that the structures of languages differ throughout the levels of linguistic analysis. Besides, languages belong to families and are therefore grouped considering their typologies and genealogies. The Ibibio and English languages are two distinct languages belonging to the Niger-Congo language family (Udoh 34) and the IndoEuropean language family (Encyclopedia Americana 731) respectively. Since this work is a contrastive study of derivation of nouns from verbs in English and Ibibio languages, it is pertinent to introduce Ibibio for clarity purposes, considering the fact that English is a world language.

The Ibibio is both an ethnic group and a language within Akwa Ibom State which occupies the South-South geo-political zone of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This ethnic group constitutes the fourth largest ethnic group in Nigeria, after the three major ones with a population of about four million. They speak Ibibio as their mother tongue and inhabit the South Eastern part of the country (Essien ix). It is the largest ethnic group in Akwa Ibom State with fifteen out of the thirty-one local government areas speaking this language. As such, Ibibio is regarded as the state language (Udoh 35).

Genetically, the Ibibio language belongs to the Benue – Congo sub-family which in turn can be traced to the Niger-Congo family, one of the largest language families in Africa, according to Greenberg’s classification. By this classification,

Ibibio shares a common ancestry with the lower cross group of languages as Udoh (34) asserts.

On the historical development, the Ibibio language is as old as the people, dating back to centuries ago but with a recent history as a written language, according to Essien (x), after much frustrated attempts to attain orthography. Several attempts at making Ibibio a written language met with setback. Thus, the language remained unwritten and unofficial for decades until 1983, when with the sponsorship of an Ibibio cultural organization, Akwa Esop Imaisong Ibibio, the language received express approval of its orthography by the Ministry of Education of the then Cross River State of which Akwa Ibom was a part. This orthography was edited by Professor Okon Essien and officially approved by the Ministry of Education in a letter with reference number MOE/COM/1/-VOL.X/482 of September 12th, 1983 as Essien (xi) reiterates. At this point, it can be stated that Ibibio is probably a language so far in Nigeria whose orthography has been designed and produced by the owners of the language themselves as opposed to those of the major languages which were produced by either expatriate missionaries or government agencies.

As Urua (29) confirms, the sound system of Ibibio has been described by a number of scholars. The positions of these scholars differ as to what actually constitutes the Ibibio phonetic segments as opposed to those that are merely phonetic. We are not to join in the debate but that Ibibio as a language has both the vowels and consonant sounds. The disparity in the scholarly representations is as a result of dialectal differences which appear indeed to be mutually intelligible among speakers. The Ibibio vowels include: /i,e,a,∧ כ,o,u/ and the consonants include: /p,b,t,d,k,kp,f,s,m,n,ŋ,w,r,y,h/. The English language has forty-four speech sounds divided into twenty vowels and twenty-four consonant sounds. Each combines together to form acceptable sequence in the language. Therefore, word segments (morphemes) or sounds are not haphazardly strung together but in line with the morphological rules and patterns of that language. Morphological expression of affixation is not universal but varies from language to language (Haspelmath 4). Languages follow a conventional pattern as agreed upon by that speech community in their word formation. The Ibibio and English languages are no exceptions to this maxim as there are points of departure in their derivational patterns.

According to Finegan (42), “processes of derivation that transform a word into another word that has a related meaning but belongs to a different lexical category are common in languages of the world.” Since derivation is a means of extending the vocabulary of a language, derivation of nouns from verbs is not left out in this bid. Affixations which involve a process of forming new words by adding bound morphemes either at the beginning or ending of bases play major roles in derivation. They are extensively used in the creative lexicon of words in languages to derive new lexemes. Derivational affixation, in many cases, results in a change in word class. Such affixes derive new words and their function is not to express morphosyntactic categories but to make new words (Crystal 138). The derivation of these new words is through affixation to the base. This knowledge of affixation in both languages under study is a convenient starting point to understanding how words, especially nouns, are derived from verbs.

Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (67) maintain that knowing a language means knowing the morpheme of that language which is the elemental unit that constitutes words. Rules of morphology determine what kind of affixation produces actual words within a language and which one produces non-words. Derivations need to be learnt as individual words. The selection/choice of the right derivative is a desideratum for achieving the correct derivation within the language. For instance, the verb postpone is derived as postponement and not *postponsion but we derive management from the verb manage and not *managetion. In a nutshell, words have internal structure which is rule-governed. Since morphology studies the form of words, our morphological knowledge may lead to rule-governed creativity in the use of language. To be understood, our linguistic expressions must comply with the rules of the language (Booij 21). In order to derive the actual word of a language, the correct affixation is needed for such a purpose; otherwise a wrong word is produced.