A Descriptive Study of Level-Ordered Morphology in Oluwanga

Résumé

This paper is a detailed description of the morphology of Oluwanga within the framework of the lexical morphology theory, which views the morphological structure of a word as consisting of several levels or strata that are reflected in the processes of affixation in the formation of words. In many languages of the world, the lexicon consists of two or more strata, as such, the study seeks to examine the number of strata in the Oluwanga lexicon and the extent to which the principles of the lexical morphology theory apply to the dialect, with a view to describing the resultant form of Oluwanga lexical items when subjected to the morphological processes of affixation. The data employed in this study was gathered through elicitation by the author who is a native speaker as well as through conversations conducted with four informants who are competent native speakers of the language. The study focused on two word categories, the noun and the verb, and the data collected revealed that the Oluwanga lexicon is hierarchically structured where derivational and inflectional affixes are mapped onto interlinked strata accompanied by the bracket erasure convention where the internal brackets formed during word formation get erased at each level.