A Study of Clipping and Blending in Jukun Language

Abstract

Word formation is a universal principle or characteristic of all languages of the world. In the daily life of human beings, words are used and new words are formed and reformed in order to contain and accommodate all entities. This is the concern of this current study entitled ‘A study of clipping and blending in Jukun” This research study analysed some of the word formation processes, especially clipping and blending and how they are used in forming new words in the Jukun language. The research aims at identifying, clipped and blended forms found in the Jukun language and how they are formed as well as their types, also, how clipped and blended function forms in Jukun syntactic construct. Among other areas of language study, the research was restricted to morphology and specifically, clipping and blending in Jukun. The geographical areas of interest to this study is “fiidi” in Benue and “Jalingo” in Taraba States. Data for this study was sourced through primary and secondary sources and the intuitive knowledge of the researcher. The study adopted the functional theory by Halliday (1961). The study found that, in Jukun only clipping of the back syllable and clipping
of the front syllable exist. It was also discovered that in the Jukun language, there may be slight changes between the original form of the word and the clipped form of the word, some of the times while the original form of the word is in past tense, the clipped form of the word is in present tense or present continuous tense. Whatever the change may be, in Jukun, both the original form of the word and the new word (clipped form) maintain the same meaning or idea. It was also found that there are three types or forms of clipping: clipping of the initial syllable, mid and final syllable, however only initial and final clipping are obtainable in the Jukun language. Yet others are formed from simply clipping out the middle part of a word and merging it with other words in full or parts. It was then concluded that, there is both clipping and blending in the Jukun language and they contribute a large volume of words into the Jukun vocabulary. It was recommended that, other morphological processes like coinage, acronyms, reduplication, borrowing, and so on, should be studied by subsequent researchers with elaborate and deeper research in reference to these processes that are not considered
in the present study.