GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

This study sought to find out the position of verb particle in negative sentences in Esan language and to find out whether her genetic nature, being member of Edoid, reflects the language universal validity about negative marking. Negation is a denial of an assertive proposition or a predication that a proposition is untrue. Different languages employ different method of marking negation. Different languages are typified based on their negation marking strategies. Some of the strategies include; the use of negative particles, affixation, independent lexical item, prosodic melody (tone and intonation). Every human language possesses some formal ways of expressing negation. While the conveyed meaning and functions of negation are relatively uniform, the formal devices employed exhibit a considerable degree of variation across languages. A negative sentence must have a negative operator in form of affix or a full fledge word. Other distinctions that have been made when talking about the scope of negation are sentential versus constituent negation and nexal versus special negation. Sentential negation takes the whole sentence in its scope whereas constituent negation only applies to a particular constituent. Based the copious and relevant empirical data, the study made the following discovery amongst others about the preverbal negation in Esan language.; that there are two verbal negators in Esan language: “i” and “bha”; that the morpheme i on the last syllable on the subject in negative sentences is a negator in imperfective sentence. One of the recommendations made was that preverbal negations must be addressed in order to give linguistics beforehand knowledge on its usage and application, considering the fact that every language exhibits a device to reverse the true conditions of a sentence and that natural languages show a surprisingly large range with respect to the syntactic and semantic behaviour of negative elements.

KEYWORDS: Homonyms, Modal Auxiliary, Clause Structure, Preverbal Negation, Esan language