A Morphological Analysis of English-Igbo Merged Verbs in Code-mixed Utterances

Abstract

This study examines the influence of Igbo morphemes on English verb structure in code-mixed/switched utterances. There is overwhelming evidence that English and Igbo languages interfere with each other in informal conversations of the Igbo-English bilinguals. This calls for researches to ascertain the degree of English dominance on Igbo language or vice versa. This paper, therefore, examines informal conversations of the Igbo-English bilinguals with particular focus on the verb structure. The paper adopted Corpus Linguistic framework for data collection and Token approach for data description. Data analysis and findings reveal that English verbs can easily be merged with Igbo affixes in code-switched utterances of the English-Igbo bilinguals. They also reveal that a new language known as Engli-Igbo has been formed by the merger. This leads to the conclusion that Engli-Igbo is a present reality. Based on this, this paper recommends further researches on Engli-Igbo linguistic merger in the areas of phonological, syntactic and other areas of morphology.