A Morpho-Semantic Analysis of Verbs as Lexical Categories

Abstract

A principal aspect of language analysis is the investigation of the structure of words and their organization into the grammar of a language. A language satisfies the communicative needs of society and people using it when certain rules are observed in the production of linguistic expressions. A lexical category is a unit of classification of words in the grammar of a language and serves to portray the unique configuration properties of certain words and word classes. This paper surveys an aspect of word categorization in Ẹdo language (lexical category) with a special focus on the properties of the verb as a member of this class. Illustrations will be provided in the paper to justify first of all the dichotomy between different classes of words in the language (lexical vs functional) and the place of the verb in the category of words known as ‘lexical’. The findings of the paper will show that the verb possesses rich morphological, syntactic and semantic features that justify its inclusion in the class of lexical class of words.