Aspects of the Socio-Semantic and Linguistic Analysis of Ìgbò Personal Names
Abstract
This paper provides a semantic and sociolinguistic analysis of Ìgbò personal names and explains their contextual meanings and symbols from the sociolinguistic point of view. This view considers names as socio-cultural tags that have socio-cultural functions and meaning. It is observed that Ìgbò names are not arbitrary, but contextually based on socio-cultural and ethno-pragmatic considerations. The qualitative research design was used in analyzing the data collected using the descriptive content analysis. The sampling technique adopted is the purposive sampling technique and sources of data are primarily from guided interviews, observations and personal intuition of the author who is a native speaker of Ìgbò. The findings of this paper reveal that Ìgbò personal names can be grouped into: positional names, manner names, circumstantial names, periodic names, death preventing names, theophoric names, physical appearance names, virtue names, pet names, praise names, metaphoric names, death-potency names, predictive names, symbolic names, fortune and consolation. It is also noted that phonologically, a sequence of two vowels in an Ìgbò personal name is always contracted to one vowel
in the phonetic realization of the name. The paper further reveals that
morphologically, Ìgbò names can be clipped or compounded, while syntactically,
Ìgbò names can be declarative or interrogative sentences.
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