RELATIVIZATION IN ESAN LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

This project work explores the phenomenon of relativization in the Esan language, a language spoken by the Esan people in Edo state, Nigeria. Relativization is a linguistic process used to create relative clauses, which provide additional information about a noun or pronoun in a sentence. The study aims at discovering the relative makers in the language, as well as its role in sentence structure and meaning. The project begins with an overview of the Esan language, including its historical and grammatical features. It then delves into the concept of relativization, discussing its definition, types, and functions in various languages. The general objective is on how relativization is realized in Esan, examining the formation of relative clauses, the grammatical structures involved and types of relativization in Esan language such as: subject, object, possessive and types of relative clause. To gather data for analysis, an oral interview of five (5) native speakers of the language of study was conducted, a corpus of Esan sentences containing relative clauses was collected. These sentences are then analyzed using the theoretical framework of descriptive analysis to identify patterns and rules governing relativization in the ix language. The study also investigates the semantic roles and restrictions imposed on relativization in Esan. The findings of this project shed light on the syntactic and semantic aspects of relativization in Esan, where it was discovered according to this research that esan has two relative marker's: nọ ,ni. contributing to the understanding of this linguistic phenomenon in the language. The results can also have implications for language documentation, preservation, and teaching of Esan.