Ditransitive Constructions in Igbo

Ditransitivity has been researched extensively but with a heavy focus on Indo-European languages. Only recently has research been carried out in some African languages (Malchukov et al 2010). However, Igbo is not treated in the handbook. This work attempts a comprehensive study of ditransitive constructions in Igbo by discussing some basic terminologies such as 'role prototypes, alignment, constructions etc'. It goes further to discuss the notion of 'ditransitive construction' in the language from a purely semantic point of view. In doing so, It is held that Igbo is an example of a language without overt case marking. It is also discovered that Igbo does not possess indexing or flagging of its arguments, while the word order is predominantly fixed. Based on this, Igbo possesses neutral alignment in flagging and neutral alignment in indexing. There is flexibility in word order whereby the basic and more dominant word order is RT when they are full NPs, but the word order can change to TR when the T is a pronoun and represents old information. Hence, this work has led to the positioning of the language within the cross-linguistic typology of ditransitive constructions.