Published Article

ABSTRACT

Although the verb is the most important lexical category in the predicate slot of a sentence in many languages of the world, it can still be done away with. This is possible through the Verb Phrase Elision (VPE) mechanism, which is a situation in which a VP component of the construction is missing under some kind of identity with another VP in the antecedent clause. This is a well-known process in the English language but has never been discussed in Igbo. It is this gap that the present study wants to fill. The study reveals that under certain contexts, a linguistically incomplete structure could be grammatical and acceptable in Igbo. Certain factors that encourage and make this possible include when there is syntactic and semantic interaction between a subsequent clause and its antecedent and, making reference to the context in the understanding and interpretation of linguistic materials. Data for the study were collected through interviews, participant observation, and library information. The Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 2001) was adopted for analysis. The result shows that the elision of the verb phrase in the target construction happens under syntactic identity with an overt antecedent VP structure when the Spec of TP is filled by a subject. Following Hankamer and Sag (1976), we take VPE to be deletion of the VP at PF. The study is significant because it is beneficial to researchers, teachers and students in linguistics studies.

KEYWORDS: verb phrase, ellipsis, linguistic, minimalist program, spec TP