GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the movements operations of verb complements in OÌ©gba. The language is spoken across forty-one communities in OÌ©gba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area, Rivers State, Nigeria. This study adopts the Trace Movement theory which states that any grammatical constituent that moves from its extraction site to the landing site leaves a trace (an empty category also known as ghost copy) at the extraction site. It employs the descriptive survey design. The data for the study were collected through the intuition of the researcher and unstructured elicitation oral interview technique. The method of data analysis that is adopted in this study is purely descriptive method of morpheme-to-morpheme glossing. It is observed that there are three grammatical constituents that can move from the VP slot in OÌ©gba. The grammatical constituents are the NP, PP and the CP. This suggests that the V which is the lexical head of the VP remains in-situ. The extraction site of the moved constituents is typically the VP while their landing site is the SPEC-C^I. That is, all the grammatical constituents moved leftward. The paper did not find a case of rightward movement. This is because what triggers the movement of these grammatical constituents in the language is the desire for communicative prominence. It was affirmed that focus or emphasis is achieved in OÌ©gba through clefting or relativization.