Internal Structure of Anaang Compounds

Abstract

The concept of compound is an interesting phenomenon in morphology. Compounds provide motivation for assigning internal structure to words. This is achieved through a process known as compounding. Compounding deals with word structure rules rather than word formation rules. Our focus in this paper is to analyze the phonological constituent processes necessary in Anaang productive words. Data was collected through structured interview using an English word list of 50 compound words. This was administered to fifteen native speakers of Anaang purposely selected. They provided the Anaang equivalence of the word list verbally, which was recorded with a tape recorder. Relevant data was elucidated from the tape, transcribed and used for analysis. Analysis shows that compounding involves the combination of stems from the lexicon into a phrase or word. Anaang compounds are made up of two elements without any further dependency holding between them. This paper therefore assets that, though compounding is a morph-syntactic process, it has implications on the structure of Anaang phonology in the sense that compounding equally involves certain phonological processes which of course affect the internal structure of the syllable. This work is a contribution to the existing phonological theories, on phonology-morphology interface.