Inherent complement verbs (ICV) in Urhobo

Abstract

Inherent complement verbs (ICV) have been described in the literature as verbs whose meanings are further specified by their complements. Extant works on Urhobo, an Edoid language, reveal that little attention has been given to ICVs, which are germane to the understanding of Urhobo sentences. The study, therefore, fills this gap by building on the discussion of inherent complement verb phrases with fresh data from Urhobo. Data were elicited from competent speakers of the language. Although this study is in most part descriptive, the Minimalist Program was adopted to account for the derivation of ICVs constructions. Focusing and pronominalisation were employed as syntactic tests to identify ICVs in the language. The paper shows that for an ICV to be properly focused in the Urhobo language, it has to move with its complement. Also, findings reveal that when the complement of an ICV undergoes pronominalisation in Urhobo, the meaning of the ICV is not retained in some instances. The study gives insights into the structure of the vP layer by accounting for the derivation of ICV constructions in Urhobo. It concludes that ICVs have the same syntactic distribution as any other transitive verb in Urhobo.