Author

Patience Ashesla Garba

Observed names: Garba, Patience Ashesla, Patience Ashesla GARBA, Patience Ashesla, Garba

Institution: Nasarawa State University

Observed institutions: University of Nigeria, Nasarawa State University

OpenAlex ID: A5099639916

Compound Words and Phrases Distinction in Eggon: A Morphosyntactic Study

2026 · Patience Ashesla GARBA, Friday Nyizo DANSABO · SOKOTO JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION STUDIES

Ideophones in African Languages: the Eggon Case

2026 · Patience Ashesla Garba · Journal of Nigeria Languages’ Studies (NILAS)

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Headedness is a central concept in morphological theory, referring to the element within a complex word that determines its grammatical category and core semantic interpretations. The notion of the head has been widely applied to compounding and to some extent affixation, but its status in reduplication remains obscure. This study investigates the manifestation of headedness across three major word formation processes- compounding, affixation and reduplication in Eggon- and also tries to evaluate whether a unified account of morphological headedness is attainable. Data is sourced from introspection, observation and documented sources and analysed descriptively using construction morphology. The findings show that compounding in Eggon obey both the Right-Hand Head Rule and the Left-Hand Head Rule. That is, any of the constituents that determines the meaning and word class serve as the head. In affixation, the affix serves as the head because it determines the word class of the derived word. The reduplicate serves as head in reduplication because it determines the meaning and syntactic category of the reduplicated word. This research argues that headedness is not uniformly manifested across the three major word formation processes of compounding, affixation and reduplication in Eggon. In compounding, any of the constituent that determines the syntactic category of the entire compound is the head. The prefix is the head in affixation and the reduplicate is the head in reduplication. Each word formation process may require a process-specific theoretical concept. This finding contributes to the universality and limitation of morphological headedness in linguistic theory.

2026 · Garba, Patience Ashesla · AL-QALAMA Journal of Languages and Literary Studies

Reduplication in Eggon Language

2025 · Patience Ashesla Garba, Chukwuma O. Okeke · International Journal of Languages and Culture

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Lexical Ambiguity in Eggon Language

2024 · Patience Ashesla Garba · Tropical Journal of Arts and Humanities

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Eggon Language Counting System and Derivational Processes

2017 · Patience Ashesla, Garba · Journal Of The Linguistic Association Of Nigeria

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Works count: 6

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