Subordinate Clauses In Dadiya: Field Research On The Use Of Enclitic -I

The author, Stephen Dettweiler, is a member of SIL International. From 1991 to 2017 he lived in Nigeria doing research on Nigerian languages. He currently functions as a remotely based linguistics consultant available to Nigerian language projects. The Dadiya project recently requested his assistance to investigate the use of a clitic -I, observed to occur frequently at the end of subordinate clauses in narrative and hortatory texts. This article shows how widespread the enclitic is for various types of subordinate clauses in three Dadiya narratives, accounting for its presence (and occasional absence) in both simple and nested clause structures.