ABSTRACT
This research focuses on the Strategies employed by Esan Language of Lexical Semantics and Lexical Negation. Esan Language is spoken in four Local Government Areas in Edo State the language is classified under the Kwa sub-group of the Niger Congo Family. This work aims at describing and accounting for the various lexical relations and negations in Esan Language and to facilitate one’s knowledge of words meaning in the language.
The primary data collected for this work was from two (a male and a female) competent native speakers using a word list illustrating different lexical relations and negations. Furthermore, the focus of the present study is to examine five lexical relations including synonymy, antonym, hyponymy, homonymy and metonymy, in addition, the project will look at lexical negation.
The findings in this study reveals that Esan uses Negative and Positive terms in expressing antonyms, synonym are understood to be partial, hyponyms are represented in general forms, homonyms are represented in homographs, metonyms are gotten from general terms and negative terms have no particular negative marker but are represented with tones and the negative morpheme ẹ.
