Causativity is a universal feature of the grammar of languages. It is also a fundamental category of human cognition. This has stimulated a wide ranging literature on it. However, there is only one major investigation of causativity in Ìgbò and this work is essentially theory oriented, neglecting the centrality of causativity in Ìgbò tradition, socio-cultural milieu, and belief systems. Thus, this investigation, has the objective of describing the morphosyntactic features and lexicalisation patterns of Igbo personal names in order to situate the significance of causativity in Ìgbò tradition and culture. Ìgbò personal names have causativizing morphemes in their lexicalised forms. These morphemes include fùnà, gbò, gbú, mé, kwé, kwú, and nà. They encode causative senses when affixed to nominals or clauses. The lexicalization of these fused forms produce Ìgbò personal names with causative readings and socio-cultural and contextual interpretations. The grammatical analysis of these personal names

Cross-linguistic studies have ascertained that the information units within clause structure are systematically coded. These information units shape the information structure of the clause and focus structure is the term for it in the literature. Previous studies on Igbo focus structure centre exclusively on the syntactic derivation of the clause to determine the focus structure. Therefore, this study investigates how pragmatic considerations and morphological markings in the clause structure determine the various types of Igbo focus structure. The study adopts the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) framework, which seeks out the relationship between referring expressions in a clause and the focus structure. RRG also has the advantage of formally projecting focus structure into the representation of clause structure. Four categorical types of focus structure occur in Igbo. These include, subject focus with the

The universal grammatical concept of causativity has received little attention from Igbo grammar scholars. On the contrary, the equally universal concept of transitivity is well studied but with attendant controversial issues. Nevertheless, the notions of causativity and transitivity are represented by the morpho-semantic properties of the Igbo verb. This study investigates these morphosyntactic properties in order to identify the contrasts between causativity and transitivity. The investigation involves an analysis of the predicate and event structures of the Igbo verb. This leads to the conclusion that the contrast between transitivity and causativity in Igbo lies in the event structure of the verb. Verbs with transitivity features represent single events in their conceptualisation while causative verbs represent two sequential events in their conceptualisation.

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