Grammatical Gender Assignment in Igbo Nominal Morphology: Towards a Unified Lexicosyntactic Account

This dissertation develops a unified lexicosyntactic account of grammatical gender assignment principles in Igbo nominal morphology, addressing a long-standing theoretical debate in Igbo linguistics concerning whether the language's nominal categorisation system constitutes a true gender system, a noun class system, or an uncategorised morphological domain. Previous theoretical accounts have been fragmented across incompatible theoretical frameworks and have relied on limited descriptive data. The study assembles a nominal morphology database of over four thousand Igbo nouns drawn from published dictionaries, fieldwork elicitation, and a forty-thousand-word natural speech corpus, coding each noun for morphological form, semantic field, syntactic behaviour, agreement trigger capacity, and dialectal variant. The analysis is conducted within the framework of Distributed Morphology, supplemented by insights from typological gender theory and Igbo-specific noun class proposals. The dissertation argues for a three-way Igbo nominal categorisation system grounded in syntactically active prefix classes and semantically organised agreement domains, resolving apparent contradictions between morphological form and syntactic behaviour through late-insertion mechanisms. Original data from Ika-Delta and Ezza dialects demonstrates systematic morphological correspondences that support the proposed unified account across dialect zones. The theoretical contribution includes a formal feature geometry for Igbo nominal categories and predictions for cross-linguistic comparison with related Igboid languages. Keywords: Igbo nominal morphology, grammatical gender, distributed morphology, noun class, lexicosyntax.