Subject Agreement and Ibibio Clause Structure
Keywords:
Agreement Morpheme, Tense-Aspect Morphemes, Functional Heads, Ibibio Clause Structure, FeaturesAbstract
The agreement morpheme is an obligatory part of all verbal morphology in non-imperative finite clauses in Ibibio language. Visible copies of agreement morphemes appear multiple times attached to every verbal functional head like aspect, auxiliary, mood, participle as well as tense in the same clause. This creates a problem of analysis for the phrase structure theory which projects only one agreement projection for finite clauses. The theory cannot account for the multiple realization of agreement projection as attested in Ibibio language. It is arguable that the multiple occurrence of agreement projection in Ibibio non-imperative finite clauses is a result of the need for all the functional heads in the clause to agree with the subject DP. It is shown that the study of the interplay of morphemes in Ibibio clause structure can help to resolve some empirical and theoretical questions that have currently been deliberated upon in the linguistic literature such as deciding which of the two projections (AgrP or TP) is the highest in the clause structure. Analyses of empirical data collected from native speakers of Ibibio through elicitation method show that AgrP is not
an independent projection, because agreement feature is regarded as [-interpretable] phi feature. Rather, each of the major functional heads with [+interpretable] phi features is an agreement bearer. This study shows that the clause is a TP, a maximal projection of T and that the head of what would constitute the agreement projection AgrP is fused into the major functional heads.
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