Igbo Clitics as Agreement Markers: A Study of Grammatical Number in English and Igbo.

Abstract:

This study investigates the morphosyntactic analysis of grammatical number in English and Igbo languages. This study, therefore, sets out to examine the differences and similarities that exist in the use of grammatical number in English and Igbo, exploring areas of similarities that may enhance the learning of the second language, and areas of difficulties that may pose problems to the second language learner. No theoretical framework is employed, since the study is descriptive. The study examines how grammatical number is marked in English and Igbo. The study establishes that gender could be neutral, masculine, or feminine. It delineates person into first, second, and third. Number is the focus of this study, how it affects the various parts of speech – nouns and grammatical number, pronouns and grammatical number, verbs and grammatical number, demonstratives and grammatical number. The study concludes that the Igbo language is very rich in its ability to produce options in varying syntactic constructions and relations. We therefore termed the constituents that mark number agreement between the subjects and the objects and the verb as AGR morphemes. The nature of these AGR morphemes needs to be explained theoretically and we shall leave that for another study.