Class Marking in Emai: Retention, Reduction, and Transformation of Inflectional Resources

Schaefer, Ronald P.; Egbokhare, Francis O.

ISBN 10: 1498542727 / ISBN 13: 9781498542722

Published by Lexington Books, 2019

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781498542722

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Class Marking in Emai: Retention, Reduction, and Transformation of Inflectional Resources
• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1498542727
• ISBN 13: 9781498542722
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Class Marking in Emai examines the retention, reduction, and transformation of inflectional resources pertaining to noun class in Emai, an Edoid language of south-central Nigeria. Ronald P. Schaefer and Francis O. Egbokhare demonstrate that in contrast to its Bantu relations, Emai retains form class prefixes on a relatively small group of nouns that distribute across eleven declension sets. Prefix addition rather than prefix alternation arises when ideophonic adverbials become syntactically displaced due to information structure and when Emai borrows lexical items from other languages. Reduction is evident in two primary domains: agreement class or gender and prefixes that alternate to express form class and grammatical number. As for transformation, it characterizes tonal, nominal and pronominal domains. Putting Emai and its noun class system into a broader cultural and archaeological context of historical language change, this book explores what it means to be a Benue Congo language with a reduced inflectional system.

About the Author

Ronald P. Schaefer is professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Francis O. Egbokhare is professor in the Department of Linguistics and African Languages at the University of Ibadan.