Compounding in Sɩsaalɩ

Abstract

Words are the building blocks of language and “knowing the structure of words and their formation in a language empower speakers to form new words in the language without violating the morphotactics of that language” (Lawer 2017, p. 1). The morphology of Sɩsaalɩ is yet to receive the attention it deserves. Consequently, considering the importance of compounding as an interesting linguistic phenomenon, this study explores the phenomenon in Sɩsaalɩ to unravel the nature of compounding in the language and to distinguish compounds from other complex structures like NPs and derived nominals in the language. Data for the study is drawn from electronic media (radio discussions), interactions with speakers of Sɩsaalɩ, books and documents in Sɩsaalɩ. This was augmented by the native speaker intuition and introspection of the researcher. The study reveals that, the syntactic constituents of Sɩsaalɩ compounds include Noun-Noun, Noun-Adjective, Verb-Verb, Noun-Verb, Noun-Verb-Noun, Noun-Noun-Adjective. It is also observed that there exit personal names in Sɩsaalɩ that are compounds which constituents are a combination of different syntactic categories. It is revealed that, in Sɩsaalɩ, N-N compounds are nominal and the most prevalent forms of compounds. It is observed that, there exist both endocentric and exocentric compounds in Sɩsaalɩ. The endocentric compounds in Sɩsaalɩ could right-headed or co-ordinate despite the existence of a few left-headed ones. Using Construction Morphology, it is claimed that the semantic relation between the constituents of Sɩsaalɩ compounds are subjective to the syntactic constituents. The phonological processes that are involved the compounding is also looked at. It is observed that, some phonological processes that occur in Sɩsaalɩ compounding include: vowel harmony, homorganic nasal assimilation, vowel elision segment deletion and syllable deletion