A Study of Plurals and Diminutives in Iheaka Igbo

Abstract

Certain diminutive sequences shared by Iheaka speech community are conventionalized in such a way that the semantic associations are immediately apparent. Iheaka dialect undoubtedly has well defined dialect specific, seemingly plural and diminutive patterns of word formation. Besides, aside from compounding agglutination, reduplication, cities etc which the investigation of selected utterances in a cross section of Igbo dialects reveals, there exist certain word formation processes in Iheaka which are found mainly with plural and diminutive constructs. This paper draws data from Iheaka, a northern Igbo dialects to examine how diminutives and plural formation processes operate in the said dialect. The paper also discusses the diminutive as a pervasive feature of the lexicon and as it manifests itself in parts of the morphology (example: plural suffix). The above preamble shows the need and the relevance of this present study. The paper discusses with copious examples, plural and diminutive (affixes) formation in the dialect to include:chá, ché,nwá, já and ézé. Word formation analysis and descriptive generalization of morphological processes has been employed in the database about word from lexicalization. In the tone marking convention, we tone marked almost every data (in our Igbo examples) for the purposes of clarity.