The Morphological Processes Of Tiv Word Formation

In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis. Grammarians classify words according to parts of speech and identify and list the forms that words can be grouped. Although the matter is really very complex, for the sake of simplicity we will begin with the assumption that we are all generally able to distinguish words from other linguistic units. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that has grammatical function or meaning. For example, sawed, sawn, sawing, and saws can all be analyzed into the morphemes {saw} + {Ꞌed}, {Ꞌn}, {Ꞌing}, and {Ꞌs}, respectively. None of these last four can be further divided into meaningful units and each occurs in many other words, such as looked, mown, coughing, bakes.{Saw} can occur on its own as a word; it does not have to be attached to another morpheme. It is a free morpheme. However, none of the other morphemes listed just above is free. Each must be affixed (attached) to some other unit; each can only occur as a part of a word. Morphemes that must be attached as word parts are said to be bound.

Words are notoriously difficult entities to define, both in universal and in language specific terms. Like most linguistic entities, they look in two directions—upward toward larger units of which they are parts (toward phrases), and downward toward their constituent morphemes. This, however, only helps us understand words if we already understand how they are combined into larger units or divided into smaller ones.

The major task of a linguist is to describe the properties of a language. This kind of description is generally referred to as the grammar of the language. Although there are some considerable disagreements within linguistics concerning the precise form of a grammar, it is believed that each grammar of a language has the following properties:

Among these levels of analysis, morphology has been accorded rather secondary status in comparative linguistics. This research sets out to study the morphological processes of Tiv word formation. Comparative studies have shown that languages may share resemblances without being genetically related. For instance, the English and Tiv languages belong to different phyla; English is a European language in the Indo-European sub-division, whereas Tiv is a language in the West African sub-region. Therefore, the morphological features of these languages may be common in some extent, and to some degrees it may not necessarily be indicative of their genetic or historical relationship but a relationship, of universal dimension. It is obvious that universal features among languages can only be discovered through phonological, syntactic semantic and morphological studies.

The major purpose of this chapter is the review of related literature and to collect ideas and opinions expressed by eminent scholars in respect to this study. Thus, it discusses the various definitions of the term morphology, its fields, and the word-formation processes that are selected for the study. These comprise inflection, derivation, compounding, reduplication, and borrowing.

The history of morphological analysis dates back to the  ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini, who formulated the 3,959 rules of  Sanskrit morphology in the text  Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a  constituency grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ and Aḥmad b. ‗alī Mas‗ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE. The term morphology was coined by  August Schleicher in 1859 ( http://en.wikipeda/org/wiki/ retrieved on April 29, 2013)

This chapter discusses the research procedures; types of data and sources of data collection used and data collection techniques as well. This work uses a data oriented approach as the researcher would have a chance to test some personal assumptions from the native speakers of Tiv language (i.e. informants). The aspect of this study is word – formation processes in Tiv, therefore, the target of investigation is the word-formation processes. Forming words is the fundamental concern of this study.

Research Design 

This work takes a descriptive research approach. 

The data is mainly text – oriented. Both written sources and informants were mainly used as reference materials. With regard to items of Tiv data, some are texts oriented, while others were collected through oral speech sand utterances of some native speakers of Tiv, who were engaged indifferent dialogues and discussions. The introspective‘ method is also employed in gathering Tiv data. The introspective method is exclusively based on self observation. Since the language (Tiv) is familiar to the researcher, as a native speaker, it relates to her competence and intuition. Furthermore; the native informants were consulted in order to affirm or discard certain points of argument on this study.