Beyond connectives in Ngwa

Abstract

Connectives are a grammatical category in many languages of the world which serve to link constituent structures together. Connectives exhibit varied morphological forms and are used to perform different functions in the languages. The goal of this paper is to describe the forms, functions, and general characteristics of connectives in Ngwa dialect of Igbo. The primary and secondary data were collected through elicitation and written materials, respectively. The Xʹ model of syntactic analysis was used in the discussion because it helps to establish the structural link between the heads of a construction and their dependants. The study identified more than eight words used to conjoin structures in the dialect. All the conjoining elements have basic CV syllable structure, with an initial consonant (or a syllabic nasal) followed by either a low tone open vowel /à/ or a high tone back vowel /ú/.
Connectives cannot appear in sentence final positions where they introduce no clause, and the coordinating conjunction, là ‘and’ cannot be used in sentence initial position. Some conjoining words like là ‘and’, mà ‘or’, perform overlapping functions based on the type of structures they conjoin hence each can be used as coordinating and subordinating conjunction. This study is relevant in contributing to the body of literature in Ngwa dialect.