A Syntactic Analysis of Igbo Relative Clause Constructions in Contemporary Written Prose

This study presents a syntactic analysis of relative clause constructions in contemporary Igbo written prose, drawing on a corpus of texts published in Igbo language newspapers, educational materials, and literary fiction between 2020 and 2024. Relative clause formation in Igbo presents theoretical interest as the language employs internally headed relative clauses alongside head-external strategies, a typologically notable feature that has attracted intermittent attention in formal syntactic literature. However, an empirical corpus-based account of relative clause variation in contemporary written Igbo remains lacking. The research analyses four hundred relative clause tokens extracted from a purpose-built written corpus of approximately sixty thousand words, classifying each token by structural type, head position, relativised syntactic role, and resumptive pronoun patterns. Analysis is conducted within a minimalist syntactic framework. Findings confirm the predominance of head-external relative clauses in formal written registers and document a statistically significant correlation between text formality and the selection of syntactic rather than resumptive relativisation strategies. Written texts aimed at younger audiences show greater structural simplification and resumptive pronoun retention. The study provides empirically grounded syntactic data for Igbo grammar description and pedagogical reference grammar development. Keywords: Igbo syntax, relative clauses, corpus linguistics, written prose, resumptive pronouns.