VAGUENESS FOR SPECIFICITY IN THE USE OF IGBO LANGUAGE

AN APPRAISAL

Abstract

The central aim of anybody that talks or writes is to pass an information to somebody. But, the speaker or the writer of any word or sentence may fulfil his or her aim, or may not.The reason as Lobner (2002) argues is that he or she has produced or failed to produce the sound and the sound pattern correctly, or spelt or arranged the words correctly or not; and the hearer or reader understands them or fails to understand them. In other words, whether the speaker is correct in his or her pronunciation or spelling or not matters a lot to the fulfilment of the aim of the speaker or writer. These are basic facts about communication. Unfortunately, many users of language overlook these basic facts and go about speaking as they like, not minding whether they are communicating or not. This has been found to be very common among many users of the Igbo language, hence this paper is set to appraise this and identify the possible causes and proffer possible solution. Words and sentences that form the corpus of the data have been collected over a long period from various users of the language, especially university undergraduate students of the institution wherethe author teaches. Other resource persons are newscasters, church service conductors and clergy, preachers, the author’s household and from public discussions with emphasis on their speech. Cruise’s (2004) exposition of descriptive type of meaning forms the basis for analysis of our data. It is thereforebelieved that teachers, especially language teachers, newscasters, language students, the clergy, lawyers, linguists and the public who use the language in their everyday communication will benefit immensely from the paper; while it will improve communication in the language generally.