BICLAUSAL CONSTRUCTIONS: TYPOLOGY IN NGWA

Abstract

Ngwa is a dialect under Igbo. The word Ngwa also refers to the people and the geo – political area known as Ngwa land. A biclausal construction is a construction that has double inflectional projection in its structural representation. This paper seeks: to find out the various types of biclausal constructions in Ngwa and to establish if all biclausal constructions in Ngwa have overt markers of coordination or subordination. Data for the study were obtained from competent native speakers using the translation method where some English sentences were translated into Ngwa. As a native speaker of Ngwa, my intuition helped in the assessment of the data that were collected. The framework employed for the, the presentation and analysis of data in this paper is the x-bar theory of syntax. The choice of framework provides the required base for the illustration of biclausal constructions in Ngwa. The paper finds out that biclausal constructions in Ngwa are of various types, that biclausal constructions in Ngwa are derived constructions, and that the constituents in biclausal constructions function as a composite unit in the expression of a single proposition. This paper recommends a further research in biclausal constructions in Ngwa.