ABSTRACT
Nominal compounding is a very productive word formation process in Igbo language, just like in other languages. However, this work centres on Nominal Compounding which entails the concatenation of two free nominal forms to form new words for the expression of ideas and concepts. This subject matter has been worked on by many scholars, in the likes of Anagbogu (1990, 1995, 2000), Nwaozuzu (1991), Oluikpe and Nwaozuzu (1995) and Iloene (2007). However, not much detailed work has been done on the morphosemantic features of nominal compounds, hence, this work aims to describe nominal compounds, by describing the morphosemantic features of nominal compound. This is in order to establish the semantic relatedness between the morphological constituents and their morphologically realized compound words.
The work applied a one on one data collection techniques, in the gathering of data from native speakers of the Orsu dialect both within and outside of the speech community. The work also adopted the descriptive linguistics framework in analyzing nominal compounds in the language.
The findings include the fact that a nominal compound can be Exocentric or Endocentric. These two categories are further sub-divided into five sub-groups, namely: Hyponymic compounds e.g. ‘nwúnyêdí’, Co-hyponymic compounds e.g. ‘áhị́ríókwú’, Additive compounds e.g. ‘úlìíkpé’, Synonymic compounds e.g. ‘óbìụ̀tọ́’ and Compromised compounds e.g. ‘ńtị̀ ńkị́tā’. These put together, contributed to the morphosemantic analysis of nominal compounds.
