NOMINALIZATION IN KANA

The paper discussed nominalization in Kana, using Babbe dialect. The study was hinged on the following specific objectives which include discussing the concept of nominalization; find out the processes used in deriving nominals and identifying their usefulness. The data for this paper was gathered through simple unstructured selection of lexical items in the language, using native speaker intuition. The analysis of the data was through morphological processes, using the descriptive linguistic approach. The work found that nominalization in Kana is basically done through derivation, using de-verbalization, reduplication and compounding. The study revealed that de-verbals are used in deriving patient, instrument and agent nouns. Agentives were found to be of two kinds: independent and complemented agent nouns. The paper further established that verb + noun compounds are used to derive gerundives in Kana. The paper also showed that both partial and total reduplications are used to derive gerundives. The paper therefore recommended a detailed investigation of nominalization in Kana in order to ascertain the structural configuration of nominal elements in the language.