SEGMENT MODIFICATIONS AND SUPRASEGMENTALS IN IHITENANSA IGBO

📄 Project Abstract

The interest of linguists from the days of yore has been to examine language scientifically, as a unique feature in human communication. Thus, linguistic investigation deals with the structural, phonetic and grammatical configuration of any given language. Stemming from this course are phonetics, phonology, syntax and semantics as the basic aspects of linguistic investigations. While the interests of phonetics and phonology are on the speech sounds, syntax dwells on the structure, then semantics- on meaning. The main concern of the phoneticians and phonologists is to scrutinize the speech sounds that occur in spoken language. Although differences occur in the duo, phonetics is interested in the study of all speech sounds, whether distinctive or not. Phonology is interested in the distinctive (contrastive) speech sounds and their combination patterns in a given language. That shows the function and structure of speech sounds in a language. So, inasmuch as phonetics and phonology as area...