A grammatical study of reduplication in Mwaghavul

Abstract

This article examines grammatical aspects of reduplication in Mwaghavul, a Western Chadic language spoken in Plateau State, North Central Nigeria. Using a corpus of selected reduplicated words in the Mwaghavul dictionary and the native intuition of selected speakers of the language, the study aims at identifying the grammatical functions of reduplication in the Mwaghavul language. Findings of the research indicate that reduplication, alongside tonal changes in some instances, grammatically functions to indicate distributiveness in cardinal numerals, intensification/emphasis in adjectival verbs, relativity in colour adjectives, and imperative mood in some verbs. Other grammatical roles of reduplication are to mark repetitive actions, modal changes, verb focus, derivation of predicative adjectives from verbs, and the formation of a special type of alternative question in the language, among other things. The study concludes that the process of reduplication in the Mwaghavul language is signalled by the interface of morphophonological and syntactic phenomena.