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The Uneme Noun Phrase
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1.2.5 Marriage
Pastor Patrick who is the language informant says that the people of
Uneme believe so much in traditional marriage. Uneme people do not buy
the habit of marrying just only one wife but believes solely in a
polygamous marriage. It is like a compulsory fact that if someone has
not married two wives, is like the person is a lazy man.
1.2.6 Occupation
The major occupation of the Uneme people is smelting of iron
(blacksmith). The blacksmiths smelt the iron-ore mostly at night
because of the high temperature generated in the process of smelting.
Another occupation of the Uneme people is farming. They practice
commercial farming in the Uneme community. Some of their farm products
are; coca, rice, yam, maize, cassava and banana e.t.c. The people of
Uneme also practice trading. They trade with their smelt product such
as Anklets, bracelets, local necklace, cutlasses, iron weapons, knives,
plates, hoes and pot. They trade with the neigbouring community and all
their products are involved in their trading.
1.3 Genetic Classification of Uneme Language
This is a systematic way of grouping languages that share something in
common into the same family. According to Ruhlen (1991:-5), a genetic
classification is a sub-grouping of all relevant language into genetic
nodes. However, a genetic node is a group of languages each of which is
more closely related to others in that group than to any language
outside the group.
African languages like other languages
of the world have been classified by taxonomical linguistics. The Uneme
language is grouped with the languages in the Benue congo where we
later end up having Edo and Ghotuo. The Genetic classification tree
below will summarize the sub-grouping of Uneme language.
1.4 Scope and Organization of the Study
It has been discovered that the minority languages in Nigeria are not
being paid much attention to. Therefore, this long essay will describe
and present the structure of Noun Phrase in Uneme language and the
transformational processes involving such noun phrases. The processes
and the examples are presented and analyzed using Government and Binding
theory.
This research work is organized in such away that it will comprise five (5) chapters.
The first chapter presents the introductory part of the long essay,
dealing mainly with the historical background and the socio cultural
profile of the speakers of Uneme language. Also, the genetic
classification of the language, scope and organization of the study,
method of data collection and analysis, and a brief review of the chosen
frame work are presented in this chapter.
Chapter two
presents a brief review of the sounds, tone and syllable patterns of
Uneme language. It will introduce and explicitly explain with examples
in Uneme language the basic syntactic concepts such as, Phrase Structure
Rule, Lexical Categories, Basic Word Order and Sentence Types found in
the language under study.
Chapter three (3) focuses on the
Uneme Noun Phrase which is actually the main focus of this research
work. We will have the structure of Noun Phrase and transformational
processes involved in this chapter.
Chapter four will focus
on the levels of linguistic analysis in the language. It will examine
the transformational processes in Uneme language.
Lastly, chapter five will contain the summary, recommendation and conclusion of this research work.
1.5 Theoretical Framework
Many theories have been propounded for analyzing language data in order
to present a systematic description of the linguistic knowledge or
competence a native speaker possesses (Sanusi 1996). Such theories are
used as theoretical framework or methodological tools for analyzing
language data. They include; Traditional or Classical Grammar,
structural or Taxonomic Grammar, Systematic Grammar, Transformational
Generative Grammar, Government and Binding theory and Minimalist
programme. The theoretical framework adopted for this research work is
Government and Binding (GB) theory which is also known as principles and
parameters theory (PPT). This is a theory that captures the
similarities which exist between different categories of lexical phrases
by assigning the same structure to them rather than having different
phrase structure rules for NPs, VPs e.t.c.
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