Pluralisation Strategies in the Urhobo Language

Abstract

This work examines plural markers in Ùrhòbò. The specific objectives are to identify plural markers in Ùrhòbò and to examine how plural nouns, pronouns, adjectives and plural compound nouns are formed considering their positions. This study adopts the descriptive approach in analysing data. Concerning data collection, the study used introspection to generate data for analysis. This work identifies four plural markers in Ùrhòbò. These include: vowel mutation, zero morpheme marker, cardinal number marker and post nominal marker. The identified markers occur as affixes and free morphemes in the language and they bring about change at the initial position of the word. The study further reveals that plural formation in Ùrhòbò is done by changing the initial vowel of the lexical item, mostly nouns and pronouns in the singular form to plural in Ùrhòbò. The finding also reveals that prefixes at initial position change to form plurality in Ùrhòbò. Some words in Ùrhòbò do not change both in singular and plural form (zero morpheme markers).The study proves that the plural morpheme of Urhobo is basically /e/ or /i/ and it is phonologically conditioned by the vowel harmony rule of the language. Thus, all + ATR vowel occupying word initial position in a noun changes to /e/ in their plural form. In describing a small or little quantity, the prefix ‘emera’ is used while the process of describing large quantity ‘plenty or much’, a suffix /buebu/ is used. The essence of plurality in Ùrhòbò is to show that a lexical item can appear more than one. The study encourages further researches on other aspects of Urhobo morphology as this work only looks at an aspect of inflectional morphology in Urhobo.