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PROJECT TOPIC:  THE SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF UNITS OF COLLOCATION IN MÌ€BIÌ€EÌ€RIÌ€.
Department:  Linguistics and Communic..
AMOUNT:  20,000
FORMAT:   MS WORD
PAGES:  87
 
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ABSTRACT

In Igbo, scholars have been paying much attention to collocation in recent times and their work have shown that collocates abound in the language. Collocation is the habitual co-occurrence of lexical items in such a manner that, sometimes, they acquire some meaning beyond the meaning of the individual lexical items. This work tries to contribute to existing efforts made so far through a collection of some lexical items, verb clusters and constructions in MÌ€biÌ€eÌ€riÌ€, an Igbo dialect, and analyzing them to find out how and to what extent the items co-occur. By collecting some set phrases and verb clusters, and carrying out a semantic and pragmatic analysis on them, it was observed that set phrases usually generate idiomatic meanings and there are conditions that necessitate the co-occurrence possibilities found between lexical items in constructions. The conditions are mainly semantic specifications or restrictions. Consequently, the analysis shows that there are fixed collocations  and selectional restrictions in the language and that the fixed collocations are idiomatic while selectional restrictions involve co-occurrence possibilities between verbs and nouns in sentences. In this work, collocates were found to exhibit high level of fixedness and also assume various forms leading to a further classification based on the meaning they  convey while selectional restrictions exhibit a more flexible tendency as certain items select a number of other lexical items based on some semantic features. Therefore, this work serves as a boost to indigenous language documentation and also opens a new window of opportunity, for further studies, to semanticists and collocationists interested in studying the language and enriching the global linguistic corpora.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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