AN ANALYSIS OF THE SEMANTIC FUNCTION OF THE PARTICLE ‘TÈ’ IN THE NSUKKA DIALECT

Abstract

The research aims to examine and describe the particle ‘tè’ in the Nsukka dialect. It commences by looking at the treatment of grammatical particles in the German language, which serves as the theoretical basis for understanding the general notion of grammatical particles. It also looks at the presentation and the description of grammatical particles in cognitive linguistics through a comparative approach. These background approaches were used to establish the fact that the particle ‘tè’ is comparable to other particles in the grammars of well researched and established languages. The particle ‘tè’ was subjected to the basic grammatical tests that confirm the status of a word as a particle. The particle in question passed all the tests and could in addition fulfil the requirements of a composite lexical unit as stipulated by cognitive linguistics. Through the elicited language data used for analysis in this work, it was established that the particle ‘tè’ fulfils different semantic roles in utterances they appear in. This is comparable with the semantic functions of the German particle ‘doch’.  It is through these roles that one can fully examine and describe the meaning and functions of this particle in any given utterance. The research concludes that ‘tè’ in the Nsukka dialect is a full-fledged particle that has all semantic functions that are attributed to particles of every established language.