Abstract
The paper explores the infixation processes in the morphology of Iguta, a minority language of northern Nigeria. In contrast to global concern on lexicalising endangered languages for documentation, there is a little attention on documenting minority languages of Nigeria. The consistent arguments against the existence of infixes and infixation processes in the morphology of Indo-European languages (e.g., English) and in some Nigerian languages motivate this paper. Thus, Ado’s (2017) 455 Iguta wordlists was used as secondary data. With the aid of a hand analysis strategy and thematic analytical procedure, the paper reveals that infixes can be used to inflect or derive nouns and verbs. The -ma-, -ti-, -ir-, -z-, -d- and –tuta- are inflectional affixes that can be used as infixes to either inflect nouns or verbs in Iguta. In this sense, the –ma- and –ir- infixes are used to inflect verbs while the –ti-, -tuta- and –z- infixes are used to inflect nouns. For the derivational aspect, the paper discovers that –ma- infix is used to derive noun from verb and the –de- infix is used to derive another noun class from an existing noun. This implies that both inflectional and derivational affixes are commonly used in building nouns and verbs in the Iguta language. Hence, the paper demonstrates that infixes and infixation processes exist in some Nigerian languages, particularly the Iguta language.
Keywords: Language Documentation, Infixation Processes, Inflectional Morphology, Derivational Morphology, Iguta Language
