Igbo Verb Mood: A Syntactic Characteristic

Abstract

Mood is one of the verbal categories that refer to the way in which a verb is used to express certain meaning by the speaker at the time of making an utterance/sentence. The verb expresses the mood of the speaker in a sentence whether the verb is in the imperative mood – realis, subjunctive mood irrealis - which is not real and uncertain, indicative etc. Some scholars/linguists have studied mood of verbs from different languages in general and in Igbo language in particular with little attention paid to the syntactic characteristics of Igbo verb mood. The aim of this seminar work is to investigate verb moods in Igbo language while the specific objectives are: 1. to determine its syntactic characteristic 2. to identify tonal structures of Igbo verb mood. The study made use of primary and secondary sources of data collections. The primary sources of data collection include in-depth interview, observation method and researcher’s intuitive knowledge as a native speaker while the secondary sources of data collection include sourcing of data from relevant books written by renowned linguists/scholars, journals, and internet materials while a study sample of twenty (20) native speakers aged 50 - 70 years (10 males and 10 females) purposively selected for their proficiency and who have been permanent residence in these towns Owerri, Umuahia, and Onitsha  for up to 30 years. The study adopted qualitative and descriptive research design. This study also made use of cluster sampling technique in order to save time and money because the three Igbo towns selected are large. The theoretical framework adopted is x-bar theory. This theory is a theory of syntactic structures. This theory is used because it deals with sentence analysis in terms of heads, specifiers, clauses etc. Findings based on the objectives revealed that Igbo verb mood is broadly characterized into four types; imperative, indicative, subjunctive, and interrogative mood and each with sub – classes. Syntactically Igbo verb mood functions as; a statement, request, assertion, question, advice, reports, facts etc. Findings from the study revealed that syntactically, the imperative and interrogative Igbo verb mood can be used without a subject or can be used with a complement.  Wh- words exception of ‘kedu’ can occur at the sentence initial position, medial or final position. Also tone plays an important role in determining the mood of verb mood in Igbo language. The study recommends that further work should be made on the other Igbo verbs mood in the language. The study concludes that Igbo verb mood is syntactically and ontologically marked.