Abstract:
This paper examines subjects relating to morphemic structure and grammaticality in Annang language. This paper investigates the morpho-syntactic operations and the grammaticality processes of Annang, a Lower-Cross Niger-Congo language spoken by over two million speakers in Southern Nigeria but still critically under-theorized in formal linguistic literature. Working within the Constituent Structure Theory (Chomsky 1965/1981) and applying the Descriptive Linguistic Method of study, the study analyzes Annang structures across the morphological, syllabic, phrasal, and sentential levels, using elicited data, spontaneous speech, and acceptability judgments from competent native speakers. Findings reveal Annang to be a strongly agglutinative language with productive affixation, compounding, contraction, and reduplication, enabling open-ended sentence generation. Its syllable structure exhibits contrastive vowel-length delicacy and strict morphophonemic constraints. Syntactically, Annang maintains a linear SVO structure but is simultaneously hierarchical, allowing recursive expansion of verb and noun phrases without reliance on articles — definiteness and quantification being encoded morphologically or through constituent positioning. Crucially, the study establishes grammaticality in Annang not as a binary but as a continuum negotiated between formal structural well-formedness and native-speaker acceptability, varying across levels of delicacy and discourse context. The study contributes to African language documentation, generative syntax, and contrastive grammar, while laying a foundation for computational modeling and AI translation inclusion for Annang. It demonstrates that Annang, while aligning with principles of Universal Grammar, presents structural innovations with implications for cross-linguistic typology.
Keywords: acceptability, agglutination, Annang language, constituent structure, generative grammar, morpho-syntax.
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/sojolics.2025.v01i02.008
author/Akpan, E. F., & Uwasomba, B. U.
journal/Sokoto JOLICS 1(2) | November 2025 |
