ANALYSIS OF OGBA INFLECTIONAL AFFIXES

Abstract

Many indigenous language in Nigeria are spoken by a decreasing number of people, especially among the youger generations. As more people shift towards using major languages like English, House, Yoruba, use of indigenous languages is declining. Without proper documentation for easy study of Ogba language, the language might go into extinction as most of it users have switched to using English language. This study is put together to describes and analyses Inflectional affixes in Ọgba, an Igboid language in Rivers State, Nigeria. It particularly examines the inflectional and derivational operations (role) of affixes in the Language. It shows how certain grammatical ideas or notions like negation, number, imperative, present progressive, affirmative, present progressive negative, future negative forms, present perfective affirmative, the past affirmative, the unfulfilled perfective, infinitive, participle. The data for this work were gotten through interview, observation, well written material in Ogba. Eugene A. Nida's (1949) descriptive analysis of words was used to analyze the research. Furthermore, the Contrastive theory, developed by Fries in the 1940s and popularized by Robert Lado in 1957, was applied in this work. It is a theory that states that positive transfer occurs when two languages are similar, while negative transfer or interference occurs when they are not. It was discovered that Ogba language is reached in inflectional morphology.