CONSTITUENT ORDER IN THE OKPELLA NOMINAL DOMAIN

ABSTRACT

This research work discusses the constituent order in the Okpella nominal domain. Previous knowledge on the constituent order in Okpella reveals that there have been an erroneous believe on the constituent order pattern. Many people believe that all constituent order pattern are acceptable in Okpella Language. Although, Cinque (2005), attempted to group constituent ordering pattern by postulating 14 attested and acceptable word order in the nominal domain, it failed to capture the constituent order pattern in the Okpella nominal domain. The framework adopted for this work is the Phrase Structure Grammar within the Transformational Generative Grammar of Chomsky (1957) in his book, Aspect of the theory of syntax. Data for this work was collected through tape recordings by directly interviewing indigenous speakers of the Okpella Language within the ages of 40-80. Data was also collected from written documents like Bibles and hymn books written in the language. This sourced data was analyzed on the basis of theoretical framework mentioned above. And it met with the following findings; The most dominant word order in Okpella does not conforms to Scott’s (2002) hierarchy and to Cinque’s (2005) definition of Universal 20.The most dominant order is thus, Determiner NounAdjectives. Another major findings of this work is that in the ordering of more than four elements in an NP, both the possessive and adjectives occur immediately after the head noun. The work concludes by stating the preferred/base order in the Okpella nominal domain as Noun + Adjectives+ Numerals+ Demonstratives, where a head now co-occurs with the determiner and demonstrative. And that the ordering of constituents in the Okpella nominal domain is open to numerous possibilities of using more dependents than two or three.