National Institute for Nigerian Languages, Nigeria
Vol.8 No.1 (Serial No.12) 2020
139-150
2020-06-30
This study aims to find the compound registers that are used among the Farm-Centre cell-phone marketers, analyse their compounding morphological structures, and explain the meaning they convey. The Farm-Centre Cell-phone Market is located in Kano metropolis, the largest city of Northern Nigeria. The study employs an ethnographic method of data collection and adopts Abubakar (2000) as a model of approach when analysing the structures of the compound registers. It is found that the registers have the following six morphological compound structures: (i) Genitive-based compounds [LG+N]N, (ii) Noun-based compounds [N+GL+N]N, (iii) Adjective-based compounds [Adj+N]N, (iv) Diminutive-based compounds [Dim+N]N, (v) Particle dà ‘with’ compounds [dà+N]N, (vi) Verb-based compounds [V+VN/Prep]V. Moreover, the registers are so special among the marketers because they convey meanings that are irrelevant to the conventional meanings known by the general speakers of the Hausa language.
Hausa, morphology, compounding, registers, meaning, Kano, Nigeria
doi: 10.26478/ja2020.8.12.9
Abraham, R. C. 1941. A Modern Grammar of Spoken Hausa [M]. London: Crown Agents for the Colonies. Abubakar, A. 2000. An Introductory Hausa Morphology [M]. Nigeria: University of Maiduguri. Ahmad, M. 1994. Aspects of Hausa Compounding [D]. Ph.D. Dissertation, Bloomington: Indiana University. Galadanci, M. K. M. 1969. The Simple Nominal Phrase in Hausa [D]. Ph.D. Dissertation, London: London University. Galadanci, M. K. M. 1972. The Structure and Syntactic Function of Compound Nouns in Hausa [J]. Anthropological Linguistics, 14:147-154. Galadanci, M. K. M. 1976. An Introduction to Hausa Grammar [M]. Ikeja: Longman Nigeria Group Limited. Gouffé, C. 1965. La Lexicographie du Haoussaet le Préalable Phonologique [J]. Journal of African Languages, 4(3):191-210. Ferguson, C. A. 1994. Dialect, Register, and Genre: Working assumptions about conventionalization [A]. In D. Biber & E. Finegan (eds.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register [C]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 15-30. Jaggar, P. J. 2001. Hausa [M]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. McIntyre, J. A. 2006. Hausa Verbal Compounds [D]. Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Leipzig. Newman, P. 2000. The Hausa Language: An encyclopedic reference grammar [M]. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spencer, A. 1991. Morphological Theory: An introduction to word structure in generative grammar [M]. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Wardhaugh, R. 2006. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5th edition) [M]. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Yule, G. 2010. The Study of Language (4th edition) [M]. New York: Cambridge University Press. Yusuf, M. A. 2011. Hausa Grammar: An introduction [M]. Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press Limited. |
link: