Verbal Extensions: Valency Decreasing Extensions in The Basà Language

This work investigates verbal extensions that affect the valency of verbs in the Basà language (Western Kainji). It focuses on verbal inflections that result in the reduction of the verb’s valency by one argument with regard to the basic structure. This current study attempts to investigate the morphosyntactic effects of reciprocal and reflexive affixes in the Basà sentences. The significance of this work hinges on the fact that no known work has described these processes in Basà. The language is endangered because its native speakers neglect speaking it in favour of English and Hausa. Furthermore, there is dearth of information on Basà, especially in areas of morphology and syntax, which are basic to the study of language. This study will therefore attempt to fill this existing gap in the literature. In addition to the native intuitions of one of the researchers, as a native speaker of the Basà language, data collected for this work include discourse observation, staged and elicited spoken data from fluent native speakers. It was found in the study that affixes attached to the verb root result in deriving an intransitive verb from a transitive one, and a transitive verb from a bi- or ditransitive. Both operations are triggered by verbal extensions and move the internal argument (object) to the subject position. The derived structure, therefore, is headed by a complex noun phrase but the verb no longer subcategorizes an internal argument. The work explores the morphosyntax of Basà verbs and serves as a springboard for this aspect of Basà morphosyntax. It also contributes to the morphosyntactic literature

Causative Constructions: A Descriptive Analysis

This study is a descriptive study of causative constructions in Bassa language. It is a language classified as belonging to the Western Kru of Benue Congo (Blench, & Williamson, 2000:25; Crozier and Blench, 1992:32). Causative construction implies an expression where the caused event is depicted as taking place because someone does something or something happens, that is, if x hadn’t happened, y wouldn’t have happened. The process is characterized by two events such that one occurs at t1 and another at t2, and the occurrence of the first is responsible for the second event. Data for the study were sourced by a customized checklist, my native intuition as native speaker, and some written texts in Bassa. The work discovered that morphologically derived causative verbs could come from a verb or an adjective stem and in each case; it is characterized by transitivizing the derived verb with the resultant effect of increasing the argument by one to the basic structure and transformation of the arguments. In this case, the basic subject moves to the object position and the applied argument, that is, the causer argument becomes the subject of the derived mono-clausal structure. This work also discovered that when these processes occur, the applied subject is focalized, becomes the privileged argument and displaces the inherent subject and moves it below the predicate and the derived mono-clausal sentence from the complex sentence is economized.UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities vol 14 (2) 201

MORPHOLOGICAL AND SYNTACTIC CASE MARKING IN BASSA LANGUAGE: A GOVERNMENT AND BINDING APPROACH / LE CAS MORPHOLOGIQUE ET SYNTAXIQUE EN LANGUE BASSE: UNE APPROCHE GÉNÉRATIVE TRANSFORMATIONNELLE / MARCAREA CAZULUI MORFOLOGIC ŞI SINTACTIC ÎN LIMBA BASĂ: O ABORDARE GENERATIV-TRANSFORMAŢIONALĂ

This work studies the syntactic Case in the Bassa language. It describes the process of Case assignment as it applies to Bassa language as a way of making a contribution to scholarship in an area that is highly under-described. Case refers to a noun or pronoun that shows relation to other words in a sentence. This category encodes information about a word’s grammatical role. This property of language is associated with syntactic functions of arguments such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and possessor, etc. but morphologically motivated. The investigation is situated within the Government and Binding model of the Transformational Generative theory which argues that NP/DPs are assigned Case if and only if they appear in specific positions in the sentence. It also states that the nominative Case is assigned to the specifier of finite T, the accusative is assigned by the verb, and prepositions also assign the dative Case to their complement NP/DP, all of which are determined by their positions. This study discovered that Bassa is characterized by three syntactic Cases such as the nominative, accusative and genitive Cases. Each argument in these syntactic locations has a special form which is the focus of this pape