This work presents a comparative optimality account of primary stress assignment in Standard British English (SBE) and Nigerian English (NE), particularly from the point of view of Igala users of English as a second language. Data for this study included readymade exercises and already recorded cassettes, which deal directly with primary stress assignment in SBE. This is in addition to the researcher's knowledge of these varieties of English, his choice of a native speaker of SBE as a language helper as well as useful pieces of information collated using wordlists. The method for elicitation of segments was mainly perceptual. The study has demonstrated how the constraint ordering in Standard British English is 'naturally' reordered in Nigerian English observing that the different constraint orderings notwithstanding, these constraints are the same, and are present in each of these varieties. It has shown also that Optimality Theory satisfies the requirement that any serious theory of phonology must rely heavily on well-formedness constraints, which means it must be committed to universal grammar, a fact that places the theory at an advantage over its predecessors
In spite of the fact that compounding is really pervasive in the world's languages and despite the huge volume of literatures on compounding in languages, a critical assessment of the extant literature on compounding reveals that providing satisfactory criteria for defining and or determining compoundhood still requires both language specific and cross-linguistic investigations for dependable linguistic generalizations. As it were, there are hardly any universally
This paper investigates derivational processes in the Igala numeral system to provide a detailed description of the system. The study relies on three major sources in gathering data for the descriptive analysis, namely, compilation of relevant list of Igala numerals, the researcher's intuitive knowledge of the language in addition to his training as a linguist, and a search of the relevant literature. In Igala, the complexity of deriving especially non-basic numerals involves addition and multiplication in addition to the grammatical processes: drawing from phonological, morphological, and syntactic processes such as vowel elision, compounding, clipping, blending, reduplication, and sentential expressions that yield several numeral forms in the language. In all, from the available data in this study, Igala could be said to belong to the group of languages that has a vigesimal numeral system. This is because the language employs a numeral structure where counting is done majorly in multiples of ógwú/ọ̀ gbọ̀
This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the numeral systems of Igala, Yoruba, English and German. An essential part of data collation for the study comprises compilation of comparative wordlists of Ígálà, Yoruba, German and English numeral systems in addition to the writer's personal observation and knowledge of the systems. The investigation reveals that the complexity of deriving especially non-basic numerals in the languages involves three predominant arithmetic processes of addition, subtraction (Yoruba in particular) and multiplication in addition to certain grammatical processes, especially vowel elision, clipping, compounding and so on. In addition, the summary of the quasi constraints or derivational patterns for the languages reveals that whereas German and English maintain very similar patterns because of their very close affinity as sisters from the same parent, it is not so with Ígálà and Yoruba even though both belong to the same language family. Incorporating insights from optimality theory, the paper argues that even though numeracy and the constraints that ensure well-formedness of numerals are somewhat universal, parametric variations abound. The actual patterning of the sequences of the derivational processes in individual languages may be very similar but definitely not the same, no matter how closely related the languages concerned may be. If not, they would cease to represent core grammars of different languages.
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