Reduplications in the Tiv Grammar: Classifications and Functions

The repetition of phonemes, syllables and words is a natural process that has its role in the study of Tiv language. This study focuses on the morphological repetition that is popularly known as reduplication. Reduplication is a morphological process in which a base or stem is copied or repeated. The repeated stems are called the reduplicants and these reduplicants are either wholly copied or partially repeated. The ones that are fully reduplicated are referred to as full reduplications while the partially reproduced reduplicants are labelled partial reduplications. This paper therefore is premised on the following objectives: to classify Tiv reduplications; to differentiate between reduplications and triplications in the Tiv morphology; to compare reduplication and compounding; and to state the functions of reduplications in the Tiv morphology. It adopted Inkelas and Zoll’s (2005) The Morphological Doubling Theory (MDT) in this paper. Observation-participation methodology for the elicitation of data. It has been discovered that reduplication has both morphological and phonological features. Reduplications in Tiv have been trichotomised based on the structures, word-classes and functions. Linguists or scholars should read Tiv literatures to discover the beauty of reduplications in the Tiv language