PLURAL DEVICES IN ESAN LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

Plural according to Carnie (2007) refers to quantity of individuals or things. This work attempts to examine plural devices in the Esan language of Edo state, Nigeria. The languages belongs to the Edoid language group of the Niger Congo Phylum. The essence of examining plural devices in this language is to investigate different ways native speakers of Esan pluralize their words especially the nominal elements which will then enlighten both the speakers and non-native speakers of Esan about the plural forms and pluralisation processes in Esan language. This work adopts descriptive theory of language which aims at describing how words are pluralized in Esan, and not how it should be pluralised. The data for the study was collected from the native speakers of Esan using 200 word list; other data were collected from the secondary sources.

It is discovered that pluralisation does not have effect on verbs but only on nominal elements. Nominal elements in Esan can be pluralized in four ways which are by vowel substitution, suffixation, numbers and by the use of adverbs. The findings of this work are useful for both native and non-native speakers of Esan to have more knowledge about the language and then serve as sources of reference for linguistic researchers.