REDUPLICATION IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH

REDUPLICATION IN NIGERIAN ENGLISH

ABSTRACT

This research work is concerned with reduplication in Nigerian  English from the speeches and utterances of some students in the Department of Modern European Languages and Linguistics, Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. The study shows that reduplication occurs to signify contrastive meaning, pluralism, emphasis  and  creation of new words with different semantic forms. Reduplication was therefore further discovered to be one of the features of Nigerian English.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1     BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Reduplication is a morphological process in which the root of a word  or a part  of it is repeated. In many languages, reduplication is used in inflections to convey grammatical functions and in lexical derivations to create  semantic functions. Kachru (1982) noted that the reduplication of items belongs to various word classes. For instance, some English words are often reduplicated or repeated consecutively, either for emphasis, pluralisation or to create new meanings. Bobda (1994) identified three  categories of words which generally undergo the process of reduplication; numerals, intensifiers and quantifiers. Reduplication is an important phenomenon in language studies. Its attributes have long been studied in terms of various formalist theories. However, there is a general consensus that the role of reduplication in English language has been widely ignored.