BASÀ SENTENTIAL NAMES: A BRIEF DESCRIPTIVE STUDY

Abstract

This paper studies Basà personal names composed in sentence forms: declarative, imperative, interrogative/question, serial verb construction (SVC)and reflexive. The study attempts to describe the structural, semantic and pragmatic features of these categories of Basà names to uncover their complex morphological, syntactic properties, their fascinating grammatical peculiarities and propositions. The paper argues that Basà names are a window to the complex grammatical processes of the language. It seeks to answer the question: How are Basà sentences shrunk to derive personal names? Ethnographic data for the study were obtained through interviews, metalinguistic conversations, and participant observations in Basà speaking domains such as Bassa Local Government of Kogi state, Nasarawa and Toto Local Government councils of Nasarawa State and the Federal Capital Territory (North Central Nigeria) respectively. The investigation adopted the linguistic descriptive method using the Leipzig Glossing Rule to interpret the data obtained. The findings from this study show that Basà names are characterized by different sentential structures with semantic and pragmatic attributes underlain by extra linguistic features which make an input into the grammar of the language. The study discovered that larger linguistic units such as clauses and sentences are shrunk or desententialized lexemes by various linguistic processes namely, phonological, morphological, and morphophonological strategies to derive words and compounds as personal names.