The Nominal Category in Defaka

Abstract

Defaka is a tiny endangered Ijoid language with less than fifty fluent speakers, spoken on the island of Nkoroo. Nkoroo is community situated in the eastern fringe of the Niger Delta Region in River state, Nigeria. Although Defaka has lost much of its stylistic expressions due to its endangered state, much of its grammar is still intact. This paper seeks to describe the features of the nominal category in Defaka. Defaka is an isolating language with minimal inflectional morphology. This paper therefore adopts structuralism as a theoretical framework to describe the structural and distributional characteristics of nouns in Defaka. The data for this work was got through elicitations based on the Lingua Descriptive Questionnaire. Elicitation sessions were held with fluent native speakers of the language between ages 45 to 80.  The basic word order of Defaka is SOV, Subject Object Verb, which ranks Defaka as a head final language, although it exhibits some characteristics of head initial languages. The definite article precedes its complement, quantifiers and numerals are both pre and post nominal. The noun is an open class in Defaka. They are generally not marked for singular and plural, neither are they marked for subjecthood or objecthood. Some nouns however exhibit sex gender distinction, while a few  show inherent plurality. A plurality marker a is also observed in prenominal numeral modifiers.  Nouns in Defaka may be derived through compounding or some syntactic processes. The structure of nouns in Defaka falls very much in place with that of Ijo.