THEMATIZATION IN NGWA-IGBO

Abstract
Thematization is a syntactic process that is concerned with the communicative prominence placed on a constituent in a construction. The word ‘ Ngwa’ refers to the people and the geo-poloitical area known as Ngwa land. The Ngwa people are found in Abia Statein the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Some of the objectives of this paper are: to demonstrate communicative dynamism through the use of marked structures and to show the various ways by which communicative prominence is achieved in the Ngwa – Igbo through the syntactic processes of Left-dislocation, Topicalization, Clefting and Pseudo-clefting, Data for this study was obtained using the elicitation method of translating a set of thematized constructions in the English language into Ngwa-Igbo by two competent native adult speakers of Ngwa-Igbo. Secondary data was collected from text books and the internet which were acknowledged. The theoretical framework used for this paper is the X – Bar theory of phrasal analysis and the tree diagrams will reflect this wherever it is necessary. The reason for the adoption of the X-bar framework is that it provides the required platform for the presentation of thematized constituents. Some of the findings of this paper are: that in Left dislocation a preposed constituent leaves a ghost copy of itself at the site of extraction and that there is a movement trigger in Cleft constructions in Ngwa-Igbo. This paper has considered thematization only in relation to the foregrounding of lexical item(s), it therefore recommends for an intense study of the syntactic processes used in the thematization of constituents in relation to End Focus in the Ngwa dialect and other languages of the world.