A semantic prosody of ọkụ ‘fire’ in Ìgbò

Abstract

The study sets out to analyse the lexical item ọkụ ‘fire’ so as to
ascertain if it has a negative semantic prosody. Semantic
prosody refers to the semantic environments in which a word
or phrase occurs, showing its typical behavior in lexical
and/or grammatical company. Using the AntConc software,
the lexical item was sourced from sixteen Igbo novels in its
various contexts. The component of the Extended Unit of
meaning oriented approach was adopted for the data analysis
and the various meanings of ọkụ reveal that the basic meaning
of ọkụ is ‘fire’, which can be confirmed as having the highest
number of occurrences in the corpus. Other meanings such as
‘light’, ‘hot’ are extended meanings, while ‘desire’,
‘annoyance’, ‘quickly/urgently’ are metaphoric meanings. The
study also shows that ọkụ ‘fire’ tends towards a negative SP
when the meaning is ‘to burn’, even where the meaning is to
‘put something on the fire’ (in relation to cooking), especially
when used in the figurative sense it has a negative meaning.
Hence, on the basis of the data analysis, this study concludes
that, ọkụ ‘fire’ in Igbo has a negative semantic prosody, except
in a few cases where the meaning is to ‘illuminate a place’ and
when it is used to refer to culinary items.