Syntactic Analysis of Topicalization in Ikwuano Igbo

Abstract

The aim of this paper 'Syntactic Analysis of Topicalization in Ikwuano
Igbo' is to examine topicalization in Ikwuano, with a view to
establishing the Ikwuano strategy. Syntax deals with the rules and
guidelines for sentence formation while word order arrangement
contributes a lot in the grammaticality of a sentence. Topicalization is a
mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or
clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence. This
research argues that topicalization is an unbounded movement; it claims
that, there is a complex interconnection between topicalization and
focus in the language as no constituents of a sentence can be focused
without topicalizaion. The Theoretical framework for this study is the
movement principle of principles and parameters of Noam Chomsky. In
the process of movement, an element iterates from one place to the
other. This work explains the motivation for the topicalized strategy and
its behavior in the language. The data for this paper is elicited utterances
by adult native speakers from Ikwuano and intuition from the researcher
who is a native speaker. Finding reveals that, when the moving
constituent is extracted from its logical position, it leaves behind a copy that is regarded as a ghost of the moving item. This study argues that
topicalization is a kind of focusing and fronting of constituent's
structure because it involves the preposing of the item to be topicalized
as a leftward movement rule.