GA AS A HOMONYMOUS LEXEME IN IGBO: A MORPHOSYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

In many natural languages, words may not only have meaning properties in isolation, they often bear some meaning relations with each other. Words may be semantically related either because they share certain properties or because they exhibit contrastive semantic features. There are quite a number of meaning relations which words exhibit due to how they interact with each other in the sentence. Some words enter into some kinds of meaning relations to make different meanings other than they could have made in isolation. It is this notion that gave rise to different meaning relation that obtain both at word and sentence levels. In Igbo language, there are many homonymous lexemes. These lexemes have different and unrelated meanings, but their surface phonetic forms are the same. Ga is among the homonymous lexemes we have in Igbo. This study therefore undertakes its study to find out how it manifests in the syntactic structures of the language. This paper has five sections. Section one is the introduction. Section two is overview of homonymy. Section is the morphological structure of ga whereas section four is the syntactic and semantic analysis of ga in Igbo. Section five is the conclusion.