Title: Morphophonemic Analysis of Inflectional Morphemes in English and Ibibio Nouns: Implications for Linguistic Studies
Abstract: Linguists generally acknowledge that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels oflinguistic analysis---phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are usedto describe such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the phonology and morphology of particularlanguages. The term "morphophonemics" is generally used to describe linguistic statements that can be made ofthe phonemic structure of morphemes and their effect on the grammatical content of languages. This paperbasically attempts a morphophonemic analysis of inflectional morphemes of nouns in two structurally andhistorically distinct languages (English and Ibibio) in order to discover points of differences and similaritiesusing the Contrastive Analysis (CA) model of investigation as its theoretical framework. The results indicate thatthe two languages are structurally different. For instance, Ibibio is agglutinative, tonal and analytic in naturewhile English is basically analytic and intonational. The paper, therefore, analyzes the problem that the Ibibiospeaker of English is likely to encounter in the study of the English word structure. Again, based on its findings,the paper corroborates Greenberg's (1964) and Essien's (2003) classifications of African and Southern Nigerianlanguages respectively.