IGBOSCHOLARS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF IGBO SCHOLARS FORUM, NIGERIA

This study is aimed at the examination of the syntactic operation of covert negatives in sentences in Igbo language. Covert negatives are negative operators that are not syntactically evident, but are semantically marked for negation. Previous studies (Emenanjo, 1978, Oluikpe, 1978, Uwalaka, 1997) have emphasized mainly on overt neg. particles in simplex sentences with respect to their tense and aspectual features. The present study focuses on covert negatives with a view to delineating their syntactic positions within the sentence and their semantic implications. The descriptive approach was adopted for analysis. The study found that the operation of covert negations involve the neg. morpheme (gh?) and covert negators: ?b?lad?, ewez?ga, nke, and mayaf?d?. The covert negators, ?b?lad? and ewez?ga can be topicalized while the others cannot be topicalized. On the whole, whereas the overt negative morphemes can occur without the covert negatives, the covert negators (ewez?ga and mayaf?d?) can occur without the neg. morphemes in Igbo, while the covert negatives (nke and ?b?lad?) cannot occur without the neg. morphemes.

Open Full Text (PDF)