A Morphological Analysis of the Inaugural Speeches of Governors James Onanefe Ibori, Emmanuel Ewetan Udughan and Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa of Delta State.

A Morphological Analysis of the Inaugural Speeches of Governors James Onanefe Ibori, Emmanuel Ewetan Udughan and Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa of Delta State.

ABSTRACT

Words are building bloc of a language that gives meaning to its users. These words are made up of various constituent parts (morphemes). Each part carries its meaning and this is achieved through morphological analysis, which is the process of breaking down morphologically complex words into their constituent morphemes (word meaning parts). Morphology is the building bloc upon which languages are founded. Hence, it is important for English language users to have a basic knowledge of this important foundation that aids communication. Inaugural speeches are maiden speeches used in communicating ideas and it consist of different word formation processes which enables different ideas of the governors to be passed across successfully, hence the use of these three inaugural speeches under study to better explain the internal structure of words used, the rules that guides them and various processes employed in their formation. This research is set out to analyse the various morphological processes employed in the inaugural speeches of Governors James Onanefe Ibori, Emmanuel Ewetan Uduaghan and Ifeanyi Arthur Okowa of Delta State, using Akabuike’s (2015) morphological processes in its analysis. The data used in this work was randomly selected from the inaugural speeches of the governors under study and they will form the corpus of this work using a purposive sampling method. A descriptive approach is employed in this work. In using Akabuike’s morphological process to analyse these inaugural speeches, it was discovered that the writers/speakers used affixation (prefixes that describes where, expresses negation, extent and number); (suffixes: adjective suffixes, verb suffixes and common suffixes) to give meaning to morphemes that forms a word. They also used compounding (endocentric and exocentric compound), compound that are more than two words and clipping as major morphological processes. Minor morphological processes used are: Acronyms, coinages, borrowing, derivational morpheme (where the meaning and part of speech of the original word is altered) and inflectional morphemes (where the meaning is retained by showing number, possession, tense and comperativeness). These where all used in the word formation processes of the three governors in giving meaning and to pass understanding to their citizens in their words of hope for a better Delta State.

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