GRAMMATICAL RELEVANCE OF AFFIXATION IN TIV LANGUAGE

Abstract

The study of affixation in Tiv is a necessary step in order to add to the available scholarly literatures on the language. This is because affixation is a very productive morphological process in Tiv that produces word variants that are essential for meaning expression, syntactic distribution, and as well as creating phonological effects. The researcher’s major aim is to study the grammar of word creation in Tiv through affixation and the specific objectives of the study were to examine both inflectional and derivational affixes and their grammatical relevance in Tiv. The theoretical framework used for this study is a strand of generative grammar known as ‘computational system’. Both primary and secondary data were collected and analysed using the qualitative design and findings of this study revealed that Tiv has inflectional affixes which serve grammatical functions, giving extra information about the already existing meaning of a word. Tense and number are expressed through affixation. There are also derivational affixes which are used in deriving new words from other classes of words. This study contributes to theory of universal grammar in general and the grammar of Tiv. The study contributes to knowledge by revealing the grammatical relevance of affixation in Tiv. The study recommends that further studies should be carried out on other morphological processes of Tiv.