THE CLASS OF DITRANSITIVE VERBS IN IGBO

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to classify the Igbo verbs based on the phenomenon of ditransitivity. More specifically, it aims at characterizing the ditransitive verbs of the language through the use of the concept of ‘event schema’. Ditransitivity, a type of transitivity, is a term which describes a verb or clause that takes two objects. These objects refer to the ‘recipient’ and ‘theme’. Cross-linguistically, the prototypical ditransitive verb is ‘give’. However, this prototypical ditransitive verb has several sub-classes that reflect various semantic subtleties e.g. donate. Looking at the Igbo verbs, this classification is not as straightforward as can be observed for the English verb mostly due to some morphosyntactic characteristics of the Igbo verb, especially in the preponderance of V+NP verbal complex structure, whereby the NP complement to the verb sometimes obligatorily also function as the object of the verb. Consequently, the paper argues that the notion of ditransitivity can be observed as a scalar feature ranging from the prototypical ditransitive (-nyé ‘give’) to the inherent complement verbs (ICVs) with the abstract form at the middle.