Morphophonemic Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in English and Ibibio Nouns

Morphophonemic Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in English and Ibibio Nouns: Implications for Linguistic Studies

Ubong Ekerete Josiah & Juliet Charles Udoudom

Reviewed by Ifti Luthviana Dewi

Linguists generally recognize that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics). There also exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particular languagesm “morphophonemics”. It is used to describe linguistic statements that can be made of the phonemic structure of morphemes and their effect on the grammatical content of languages.

For instance, Ibibio (a majority language spoken in Akwa Ibom and part of Cross River States in the Southern part of Nigeria) belongs to the Benue-Congo family of languages (Essien, 1990) while English is historically a member of the Indo-European family of languages.

This paper is interested in isolating points of differences that pose difficulties and those similarities that can facilitate learning of inflectional, grammatical forms that characterize the nominal morphemes in Ibibio and English languages.

Differences between English and Ibibio Noun Inflections:

Category	Ibibio	English
noun inflections	Ibibio typically uses prefixes to mark noun inflections,	English uses mainly suffixes, as in: Plateau – Plateaux; fox-foxes, among others.
The possessive case	it is generally a syntactic feature in Ibibio. Ibibio noun does not inflect for case as the English nouns do.	the possessive case is morphologically marked in English nouns.
inflectional morphemes	Ibibio adjectives are inflected to mark plural nouns having zero morphemes	English does not use such morphological devices.
noun inflectional morphemes	derivational morpheme is an initial prefix	an inflectional suffix can be added to a derivational one, as in: direction + s = directions

Similarities between Ibibio and English Noun Inflections

Category	Similarity
phonological, morphological and syntactic functions	both Ibibio and English mark inflections affixally, although the positions of such affixes differ in the two languages, for instance, Ibibio uses prefixes as in: àfiãòwò ‘a white man’ – mfiãòwò: ‘white men’ while English uses suffixes e.g., boy-boys. Both are affixes.
phonological modifications	both languages exhibit phonological modifications of nominal root morphemes in their formation of plurals.
the inflectional morphemes	the use of suppletion. This is a special type of replacive morpheme formation in which the word changes completely from its base form
Morphophonemic alternations.	morphophonemic modifications in Ibibio nouns involves the allomorphs /m,m,n, ., m/ while in English, it involves the allomorphs /s, z, Iz/ respectively.
Inflected nouns	Inflected nouns in the two languages is that the number system is inflected the same way. Thus the singular form marks one while the plural form marks more than one

Therefore, using the Contrastive Analysis (C.A) approach as a linguistic tool for our investigation, we have discovered that Ibibio characteristically uses prefixes as inflectional morphemes to mark grammatical categories while English language typically uses inflectional suffixes to mark the same function. Beside that, the most grammatical categories in the two languages undergo phonological modifications. So that, the conclusion of this paper can assist language teachers in identifying points of difficulties to learners in second language learning situation.