Nominalization in TIV

Abstract

Nominalization is a linguistic process of deriving nouns from other word classes or linguistic units. Nominalization is evident in many languages of the world. The Tiv language also exhibits nominalization. This paper critically analyses nominalization in Tiv. The objectives of the paper are: to determine the processes through which nominalization takes place in the Tiv language, the extent to which the processes of nominalization are productive in the Tiv language, and the classes of words and linguistic units that are nominalized in Tiv. Data were sourced from the native speakers of Tiv using the researcher – participant technique. The researchers documented the lexical items used during the interaction, determine the basic components of the lexical items and the word classes such lexical items belonged to. The intuitive knowledge of the researchers as the native speakers of the language was harnessed. The secondary data were sourced from the already existing literatures such as textbooks, journals and the internet. The theory adopted in the paper is Hokett’s (1954) structural theory whose models are the Item-and-Process (I.P) and Item-and-Arrangement (I.P). It has been found out that the processes through which nominalization takes in the Tiv language are prefixation, prefixation plus some modifications, tonality and desententialization (sentence deconstruction). These processes are discovered to be very productive in nominalization in Tiv. It has also been found out that verbs roots and adjectives are the classes of words that are nominalized (lexical nominalization) in the Tiv language together with sentences (syntactic nominalization).