Optimality Account of Constraints on Lexical Co-occurence In the igbo Language Focus on “buy” verb-z?

Abstract

The principles and mechanisms that constrain the combinatorial properties of lexical items in some languages of the world have been noted in many works of recent linguistic studies. The Igbo language particularly, has been observed to be consistent with most of the principles of co –occurrence constraints found in many other languages. Some of the combinatorial restrictions that have received attention in the language include, among others, selectional restriction, inherent verb compliment and collocation. The first mentioned is the concern of this study. So far, discussions on this topic have always been generative, suggesting that the mechanism is rule-based. This work departs from this traditional approach. It has been argued, with sufficient illustrative back-up, in the study that the acceptable (co-occurable) verb noun combinations in the output representations of the language are reflections of optimal satisfaction of constraint hierarchy at the input (underlying) level. The instrmetalities of the optimality theory are exploited in driving home this argument. The verb “z?” (buy) with various bought articles is used to illustrate how sensitive the specific forms of the verb are to the noun object they co-occur with. Data used are drawn from the Izhi dialect of the language (Igbo).