A Structural Pattern and Headedness in the Ibibio Determiner Phrase

This work examines the different structures of the Determiner Phrase (DP) and provides a unified account to establish the direction of headedness in Ibibio, a language spoken in Akwa Ibom that belongs to the Niger Congo phylum and is a Lower Cross language. The work adheres to Abney's (1987) position, which goes against the conventional view that determiners are Noun Phrase (NP) specifiers. Thirteen respondents provided data. It adopted the Minimalist Program (MP) of Chomsky (1995) and conceptualizes on Kayne’s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) which assumes a universal word ordering to be Specifier-Head-Complement (S-H-C). The work discovered that the Ibibio DP structure which can operate as a bare noun, a pronoun, a noun with other modifiers, and a noun with a relative clause exhibits a mixed word order overtly. The linear order of NP-D for DP expressions with the Complement–Head sequence can involve the movement of NP to Spec-DP. Even when the word order of the Complement Head and Head Complement sequences is mixed, the work predicts that DPs will have a head initial order. The work assumes a complement raising to when the order is Complement-Head. Spec to the left of the head since asymmetric C-command means precedence. Complement element is assumed to merge internally with the D-element and moves leftward to satisfy the universal word order principle.