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Salffner, Sophie (2012) 'Tense, aspect and manner encoding in Ikaan beyond verbal inflection.' In: Blench, Roger and McGill, Stuart, (eds.), Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, pp. 137-190.

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Abstract

This paper reports on aspects of the verbal morphology of Ikaan, an endangered minority language spoken in Nigeria. In addition to regular and obligatory tense-aspect-mood inflection, Ikaan shows a range of optional morphemes in the verb which translate with adverbial meanings such as ‘just’, ‘still’, ‘again’ or ‘too’ but do not fit the category of adverbs in the language. These morphemes trigger a range of changes in the verbal affixes and the verbal root, both at the segmental and the tonal level. Neither the inflectional nor the semantic side of the tense-aspect-mood system has been described yet, and nothing has previously been written about the meaning, classification and effects of the additional adverb-like morphemes. While this paper cannot give an exhaustive description and analysis of these morphemes, it provides an overview and some preliminary hypotheses about these morphemes.

Item Type: Book Chapters
Keywords: Nigeria, Benue-Congo, Ukaan, morphosyntax, tense-aspect-mood
SOAS Departments & Centres: Legacy Departments > Faculty of Languages and Cultures > Department of Linguistics
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
ISBN: 9783896454263
Date Deposited: 12 Oct 2011 08:40
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/12437
Related URLs: http://www.koep ... ails.php?id=632 (Publisher URL)

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