ABSTRACT
This paper sets out to examine the phono-syntactic analysis if Igbo adjectives. Igbo belongs to the closed class item because most Igbo linguists are of the view that, in the language, there are eight true adjectives neatly distributed among four semantic classes: Size-ukwu “large”, nta “small”. Color-ojii “black”, ocha “white”. Age-ohuru “new”, ochie “old”. Value-oma “good”, ojoo “bad” (Emenanjo 1978). Over the years, studies in the language have been able to account for derived adjectives either by reduplication or compounding. The focus of this work is to account for the phonological processes in the formation of adjectives, positions of adjectives in a sentence and types of adjectives in the language.
The motivation for this work is borne out of the fact that, although numerous works have been done on the language, there are no much works on the analysis of adjectives, using a syntactic and phonological approach in one piece and this is what this paper seeks to do.
The theoretical framework employed for this work would be the descriptive linguistic approach. The reason for adopting this framework is because this work would delve into two levels of linguistic analysis and the descriptive linguistic framework would be appropriate.
The method of data collection would be from primary sources. Adjectives in Igbo would be elicited from native speakers.
In the findings of this work, we observed the presence vowel and consonant elision, nasalization and homorganicity in the formation of adjectives. We also accounted for the presence of gradable adjectives in the language.
