DETERMINERS AND PRONOMINALS IN ESAN

ABSTRACT

This work examines some aspects of determiners and pronominals in the Esan language. The aim however of this study is to show how these determiners and pronominal are applied and used in the Esan language. Esan is a language popularly spoken around the south-south zone of Edo State. In order to achieve the goal of our research effort, an adequate descriptive analysis of the data collected was employed. The swadesh 200 word list was the main instrument for data collection, alongside the word list of some English determiners and pronominals which were analyzed using descriptive approach. The reason for this approach is to do a natural analysis of these determiners and pronominals by investigating the structure of the language through the collection of data by interaction with native speaking consultants. The data employed for this study was obtained from the elderly men and women who are native speakers of the language and who could speak the language fluently. We could not use the speech form of the younger ones as they are not competent in their use of language. In this work, the following determiners and pronominals were identified in the Esan language: Articles, Fractions, Ordinals, Cardinals, Quantifiers, Multipliers, Possessives, Demonstratives, Personal pronouns, Interrogative pronouns, Reflexives, Relative pronouns, Indefinite pronouns. In this study, it was revealed that there are two forms which the definite article ‘the’ represent; the singular form’oni’ and the plural form ‘eni’, and also that the multipliers in Esan are formed by attaching the prefix ‘tanwe’ (times) to the cardinal numbers. It was observed that Personal pronouns can surface in two forms, the full form and the reduced form it is hoped that this work will aid further researches in Esan.