Syntactic and Morphophonological Motivations for Compound Verb Formation in Nsukka Igbo within the OT Framework

This work critically appraises the roles of Optimality Theory (OT) in motivating morphophonological and syntactic elements in formation of compound verbs in Nsukka Igbo. OT addresses morpheme ordering through mappings between syntactic and morphological categories of languages. The OT phonological model has three levels: Input and GEN (generating candidates), CON (constraints set), and EVAL (evaluating optimality). GEN produces infinite candidates from any input, with no language-specific restrictions. The grammar (CONstraint ranking) determines the optimal candidate selected by EVAL. To analyze phonological outputs in Nsukka Igbo, the study focuses on Faithfulness, Markedness, and Alignment constraints. A native speaker (who relied on their intuitive knowledge) and a non-native collaborator drew data for the study. The OT methodology involves generating candidates, applying constraints, ranking them, and identifying optimal outputs. Constraints evaluate input-output similarity, dispreferred structures, and boundary correspondence, with tables showing candidate competition and violations. Compound verbs are analyzed using OT constraints like NoCoda, Dep-IO, NO HIATUS, and MAX-IO. The research discovers that OT can be used to analyse the syntactic structures of compound verbs in Nsukka Igbo. The findings of the research reveal that for a verb to qualify as a compound verb, the vowel of the added constituent must not obligatorily conform to the class of the vowels in the root verb.