A MORPHO-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF “OSA” PERSONAL NAMES IN EDO

ABSTRACT

This study is set out to examine the socio-cultural context in which personal names are used in Edo language community. It also helps us to understand that “OSA”, which translates to ‘God’, can appear in any position of the word in Edo personal names. The data used in the study were gathered through interviews from native speakers and from printed and unprinted materials of related works. The three categories of “OSA” as prefix, infix and suffix in Edo personal names were identified and analyzed using the descriptive framework by M.S Dryer (1976) he stated that this theory help in describing and analyzing the particular context, reasons and circumstances that native speakers use to identify or name their child a particuliar name which will be dependent on the context that may have led to the birth of the child or the circumstances that warranted the child’s birth in a language setting. It therefore analyzes the morphological, semantic and pragmatic use to which Edo personal names having the root morpheme ‘OSA’ is put. Also, in the process of analyzing the data, it was observed that some of these personal names ie ‘OSA’ names have been wrongly represented orthographically, to which justice was done in this work.