LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 25:1 January 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

Celebrate India!
Unity in Diversity!!

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

Poetic Encounter
Available in https://www.amazon.in/dp/B09TT86S4T

Poems
Naked: the honest browsings of two brown women
Available in https://www.amazon.in

Decrees
Available in https://www.amazon.com

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2024
M. S. Thirumalai

Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
11249 Oregon Circle
Bloomington, MN 55438
USA
Custom Search

On the Function of Verbal Reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin

Asoro, Ota Kingsley and Evbuomwan, Obed Osaigbovo

Abstract

Reduplication is the repetition of a word in whole or part in speech and it is a prominent feature in Nigerian Pidgin (NP), spoken as a lingua franca in the different regions of Nigeria. The present paper examines this feature of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin verbs with the aim of revealing the different functions or roles that the phenomenon plays in the language. The data for the study were collected from different parts of Nigeria, especially Sapele and Warri areas in the Southern region of the country. These formed a part of a corpus of primary data collected for the study of sentence modes in the language but were later observed to manifest reduplicative forms. The verbs with reduplicative forms were organized according to the different functions that they are observed to play in the language and later reviewed in different interview sessions with speakers of the language in view of verification before observations were made. The findings of the study revealed that reduplication of Nigerian Pidgin verbs perform two main functions, including emphasizing actions as well as marking iterative properties of the verbs that are repeated. The paper concludes that reduplication of verbs in Nigerian Pidgin is important in expressing the adjectival aspects of the action expressed by the verb.

Keywords: Nigerian Pidgin (PN), morphology, verb, reduplication.

1. Introduction

This paper examines the function of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin (henceforth, NP). It seeks to show that when a verb is reduplicated in NP, it may be used to indicate that a given action takes place repeatedly, i.e. more than once, in addition to existing notions in which reduplication in NP is thought to mark emphasis. This work is motivated by the need to clearly demonstrate this iterative and emphatic function of reduplication in the language.

Reduplication is a word formation process in which a word or a part (usually a segment or syllable) of it is repeated, with or without any modification (Spencer, 1991; Mensah, 2011; Holm, 2000; Li & Rawski, 2024). Ofulue (2015) is, however, of the opinion that reduplication in NP can also be a simple case of repetition of an existing word, provided that it gives rise to an extension in its original meaning. It is notable, however, that reduplication in languages may affect a part or the whole of a word, thus languages manifests both partial and full reduplication which Mustafa (2022) referred to as morphological doubling. In NP, full reduplication is very productive while partial reduplication is hardly observed.

This paper is organized as follows; this section provides an introduction to the thoughts in the paper, section 2 is an overview of the concept of NP, while the methodology employed in the paper is discussed in section 3. In section 4, the observed functions of reduplication in NP are examined with appropriate illustrations, and the concluding remarks are contained in section 5.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Asoro, Ota Kingsley
Dept. Indigenous Language
Edo State College of Education, Abudu, Nigeria
kingsleyasoro@gmail.com

Evbuomwan, Obed Osaigbovo
University of Benin, Benin City
osaigbovo.evbuomwan@uniben.edu
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.