DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY IN URHOBO

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to examine derivational morphology in Urhobo. The objectives are to identify the processes of forming new lexical items in Urhobo, to show how new words and grammatical categories are created in Urhobo. Data for the study were collected from competent native speakers of the language. The theoretical framework was ITEM AND PROCESS (IP) MODEL. The findings are affixation like prefixation, suffixation and circumfixation, play major roles in the derivational morphology of Urhobo. Furthermore, the data reveal that the head of a word using prefix is left-right branching in English. In addition, derivational morphology in Urhobo can be through reduplication and compounding. The study concludes that Affixation is central to word formation (derivational morphological processes in Urhobo). It suggests that researchers investigate the relationship between derivational morphology and inflectional morphology, while improved learning materials and linguistic documentation would aid understanding of how words are generated in Urhobo.