ABSTRACT

This work examines the place of negative markers in Ukwuani and their semantic implications for the sentence. Negation is a universal phenomenon but the manifestation of negation differs from language to language. Negation in Ukwuani involves a transformational process which converts a positive sentence at the deep structure into a negative sentence known in the surface structure by the addition of a negative marker.

The theoretical framework of this investigative study is obtained from Chomsky’s (1965) version of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG). This model shows the structure of a sentence as having two levels: surface structure level and a far more abstract deep structure level; where the surface structure level is the level of description that determines the phonemic form of a sentence while the deep structure level determines the semantic interpretation.

The study found out that there are two types of negation in Ukwuani: Sentence negation and Constituent negation. In constituent negation, only the constituent that has a negation particle that gets negated, such as the noun phrase while in sentence negation the whole of the sentence is being negated. There are also basically three types of clause in Ukwuani; they are; simple, compound and complex clause.We found out that there are negative prefix/ά/ and /ѐ/ and a negative suffix/-nѐ/ which are bound morphemes and must be attached to the verb in a sentence before it becomes negated. There are also some verbs in Ukwuani that bears the tense marker and they needs a negative prefix and the negative suffix before it can be negated, thereby changing the tense, e.g. changing a tense from past to present. Another type of negation process identified in Ukwuani language is tonal change. It was observed that negation occurs as a result of change in tone. This type of negation occurs when the sentence begins with a pronoun and only in sentence negation not constituent negation.