Morphophonemic Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in English and Ibibio Nouns: Implications for Linguistic Studies
Morphophonemic Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in English and Ibibio Nouns: Implications for Linguistic Studies
Ubong Ekerete Josiah & Juliet Charles Udoudom
Linguists generally recognize that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics). There also exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languagesm “morphophonemics”. It is used to describe linguistic statements that can be made of the phonemic structure of morphemes and their effect on the grammatical content of languages.
For instance, Ibibio (a majority language spoken in Akwa Ibom and part of Cross River States in the Southern part of Nigeria) belongs to the Benue-Congo family of languages (Essien, 1990) while English is historically a member of the Indo-European family of languages.
This paper is interested in isolating points of differences that pose difficulties and those similarities that can facilitate learning of inflectional, grammatical forms that characterize the nominal morphemes in Ibibio and English languages.
Differences between English and Ibibio Noun Inflections:
| Category | Ibibio | English |
| noun inflections | Ibibio typically uses prefixes to mark noun inflections, | English uses mainly suffixes, as in: Plateau – Plateaux; fox-foxes, among others. |
| The possessive case | it is generally a syntactic feature in Ibibio. Ibibio noun does not inflect for case as the English nouns do. | the possessive case is morphologically marked in English nouns. |
| inflectional morphemes | Ibibio adjectives are inflected to mark plural nouns having zero morphemes | English does not use such morphological devices. |
| noun inflectional morphemes | derivational morpheme is an initial prefix | an inflectional suffix can be added to a derivational one, as in: direction + s = directions |
Similarities between Ibibio and English Noun Inflections
| Category | Similarity |
| phonological, morphological and syntactic functions | both Ibibio and English mark inflections affixally, although the positions of such affixes differ in the two languages, for instance, Ibibio uses prefixes as in: àfiãòwò ‘a white man’ – mfiãòwò: ‘white men’ while English uses suffixes e.g., boy-boys. Both are affixes. |
| phonological modifications | both languages exhibit phonological modifications of nominal root morphemes in their formation of plurals. |
| the inflectional morphemes | the use of suppletion. This is a special type of replacive morpheme formation in which the word changes completely from its base form |
| Morphophonemic alternations. | morphophonemic modifications in Ibibio nouns involves the allomorphs /m,m,n, ., m/ while in English, it involves the allomorphs /s, z, Iz/ respectively. |
| Inflected nouns | Inflected nouns in the two languages is that the number system is inflected the same way. Thus the singular form marks one while the plural form marks more than one |
Therefore, using the Contrastive Analysis (C.A) approach as a linguistic tool for our investigation, we have discovered that Ibibio characteristically uses prefixes as inflectional morphemes to mark grammatical categories while English language typically uses inflectional suffixes to mark the same function. Beside that, the most grammatical categories in the two languages undergo phonological modifications. So that, the conclusion of this paper can assist language teachers in identifying points of difficulties to learners in second language learning situation.
Ifti Luthviana