Aspects of the Morphology of C'lela

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to describe the morphological properties of C’lela; a Niger-Congo, Western Kainji language spoken in the eastern part of Kebbi State, Nigeria. The study mainly adopted the classic descriptive model of linguistics in particular to explore and highlight the morphological processes and properties of C’lela. The relevant data for the study were sourced mainly from the extant literature on C’lela as well as the field data. By and large, the primary data were corroborated with the secondary sources. The study established that C’lela has distinctive morphological properties akin to other languages across West Africa. C’lela uses prefixes and suffixes on nominal and verbal categories to provide information about number and tense, and equally undergoes the major morphological processes such as compounding, derivation, affixation, and reduplication. In terms of derivation it was revealed that though derivational processes in C’lela are analyzable mainly on the principles of concatenative morphology where prefixes and suffixes are in concatenative relationship with their host stems, the language also lends itself to non-concatenative morphology, where the internal stem- vowel, instead of affixes, contains the syntactic and semantic information in the derivation. This suggests that C’lela has a derivational system that exploits affixation, as well as internal modification. With regard to compounding, it emerged that C’lela is an endocentric but a left-headed language. It was also realized that the language exhibits both partial and complete reduplications, which in most cases are lexical and semantic in function. It was particularly noted that the complete reduplication of verbs that contain heavy-initial disyllabic stems in C’lela are accompanied by phonological operations such as syllable truncation and imbrication. The study while illustrating the chief morphological processes inherent in C’lela, endeavored to examine and highlight the various phonological processes that are often triggered when stems come into contact with affixes or when compounding and/or reduplication take place. These morphophonological processes include but are not limited to; vowel copying, vowel lengthening, vowel deletion, metathesis, vowel lowering, complementary distribution, syllable truncation, and imbrication.