SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study aims at presenting an adequate description of the verbal piece which forms the core of the grammar of Ebira language. Ebira is one of the lesser known languages of Nigeria in which little scholarly work has yet been done. Ebira is my mother tongue. Chapter One gives the general introduction and describes the location (with sketch maps), the linguistic and cultural background of the language, and summarises the linguistic framework of the study. Chapter Two gives a description of the phonology, including the vowel harmony system, essential to an understanding of the grammar of the language. Chapter Three describes syntactic juncture features which include the vowel elision patterns and morpho-phonemic tone changes which affect the verbal piece. Chapters Four, Five, and Six form the major part of the thesis and describe the verbal piece in its various structures, functions and its distribution in the phrase, the clause, and sentence including the serial verb constructions. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with an analysed narrative text demonstrating, in typical connected speech, the various units described. Appendix 1 is a chart of monosyllabic verbs in the language, Appendix 2 shows the list of monosyllabic verbs, and Appendix 3 presents some sample spectrograms showing words of contrastive vowel harmony sets.