SOAS Research Online

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.