AGREEMENT PATTERNS WITHIN THE EDO NP.

Abstract

This paper aims at describing the internal structure of the Ẹdo Noun Phrase (NP). It identifies the noun (̀eǹi) as the head of the NP and characterizes it in its various manifestations. The crux of the paper is on the agreement patterns within NP. Nominal items constantly interact with a variety of other items called modifiers within the NP. The occurrence of these items is usually controlled b a number of agreement features such as: Spec-head agreement relations or phi-features which help to prevent unacceptable and ungrammatical strings. In contemporary morphology every phrase has a head. The head of the Ẹdo NP occurs in both simple and complex forms. By Chomsky’s (1986) category tetrachotomy features, the head noun is specified by the features [+N, -V]. This feature specification is in direct opposition to the category features of the verb. The noun is therefore understood to be exclusively nominal, void of any verbal trait, in the same way that the verb is unambiguously verbal without any nominal trait. Evidence from our data show that the feature specification of the Ẹdo noun does not fully conform to Chomsky’s universal categorial distinction. We show in this paper that the Ẹdo noun is a complex component consisting of a combination of units with categorial and semantic features that complement themselves to represent a single semantic nominal element. Our computational analysis of such nominals with different features reveals that the derived nominals (DNS) contain units which represent the native speaker interpretation of the items named by the nouns. Thus, Chomsky’s category tetrachotomy features are restricted in their application to Edo nouns.