ON THE MORPHOSYNTAX OF TIV PERSONAL POSSESSIVES

Abstract

A possessive is a word or grammatical construction that indicates possession or ownership. In Transformational-Generative Grammar, a popular proposal has been that in surface structure possessive expressions, the possessive sits in the specifier position of a DP headed by a null possessive determiner. This paper is an attempt to present a unified account of the morphology and the syntax of Tiv personal possessives. Tiv possessive construction has never received much attention in linguistic analysis. Therefore, the morphosyntactic behaviour of possessives in Tiv is worthy of study in order to complement the efforts of Tiv linguists; document and preserve the language from extinction. The researchers adopt the theory of Distributed Morphology by Halle and Marantz (1993) in their analysis. Primary data were gathered from survey and the researchers' intuitive knowledge as native speakers while the secondary data came from written texts on Tiv grammar. The outcome of the investigation reveals that the Tiv language has forty-
five possessive adjectives namely: ikyondo yam, akondo am, bua wam ibyua yam, naagh agh, inyaregh yagh, etc. The noun's phonological ures select which possessive that goes into the agreement with it. The agreement between the noun and the possessive is motivated post- syntactically at Spell Out. The paper concludes that Tiv possessives function as adjectives, pronouns or determiners. They are post-nominal in their syntactically underlying structure and change form in order to agree with the noun they modify. This presupposes that Tiv possessives are highly inflectional. They assume different shapes triggered by number and sound of the head
word.