PLURAL DEVICES IN IGBANKE

ABSTRACT

This study examines the strategies employed by Igbanke language to signal plurality on lexical items at word level. Igbanke language is spoken in both Uhunmwonde and Orhionmwon Local Government Area of Edo State. Ebinum (2011) classified Igbanke under the Eastern Edoid group of the Edoid language family. This work aims at describing and accounting for the various strategies employed in marking plurality in Igbanke and to highlight some of the peculiarities and distinctions which characterize the Igbanke plural system The primary data collected for this work was from seven (two females and five male) competent native speakers with the aid of a sound recorder using an extract of some nouns, pronouns and adjectives from the Ibadan 400 word list of basic lexical items. The theoretical framework chosen for this work is Dryer’s (2006) Descriptive Theoretical framework. The label ‘descriptive’ was applied primarily to the work of Bloomfield and his followers, but the term was then later also extended to cover any non-historical, non-prescriptive work outside the Generative paradigm. Furthermore, the focus of the present study is to provide accurate descriptions of the Igbanke plural devices, thus, the study adopted the framework because it is a tool we need in order to accomplish the objectives of this research. Since our task in this study is to describe plural devices in Igbanke, we consider the framework to be well-suited to our purpose. The findings in this study reveals that Igbanke uses numbers, prefixes e.g ‘ndi-’, ‘omuni-’ etc, quantifiers e.g lechan ‘all’ and buibu ‘many’ and initial vowel mutation in the case of okenhien ‘man’ à ikenhien ‘men’ to form the plurals of nouns. The plurals of personal pronouns (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd person subject and object case) and demonstrative adjectives are formed through prefixation and suppletion. We also observed the presence of reduplication, zero plural and suppletion as rare plural devices in the language. This work is not an exhaustive study of pluralization in Igbanke. There is still room for more work in the area.