AFFIXATION IN EMAI

ABSTRACT

This study is a descriptive analysis of affixation in Emai. It examines affixation in Emai and account for the lexical classes and information strategies in Emai. Previous work that has been done on affixation focuses on reduplication carried out by Egbokhare in his work reduplication and repetition. Because of the shortcoming of this previous work this work seek to exclusively examine all of this strategies of affixation such as prefixation, suffixation, circumfixation, suprafixation and reduplication. The theoretical frame work for the study was based on descriptive linguistics. The data for this study was gathered from a variety of source including several settings in which the native speaker use the Emai language freely, as well as published work in the Emai language. Statement that contain affixation where extracted from the data collected. The research found that the seven oral vowel in Emai are functional as they are used for derivation of lexical items especially nouns. It was also observed that reduplication in Emai is total, partial, or inherent as they are either inflectional or derivational as proposed by Egbokhare 1990. It was also observed that circumfixation derives both gerunds and nouns in Email