Cartography and the Left Periphery of the Clause in Igbo

Languages display certain constructions which typically involve peripheral positions in the clause. In this regard, the Igbo language provides a number of interesting evidences with respect to both empirical and theoretical issues. This paper examined the left periphery of the clause and it is carried out within the cartographic approach to syntactic structures, with special focus on the left periphery. Findings of this paper reveal that in addition to the declarative complementizer nà, ‘that’ that   are realized at the left periphery of the clause, the Igbo left periphery of the clause also involves focus, wh-constituent and topic. The left peripheral categories such as focus, wh- phrases are in most cases overtly realized by specific morphemes kà that encode such information, while topic is not overtly realized by any specific morpheme. This paper also establishes that no adjunction theory is adequate to handle the different constituents hosted at the left periphery of the clause in Igbo or the C-system. This is because the adjunction analysis does not neatly capture the behavior of wh-phrases and does not give a uniform account of wh-elements in the language. Finally, this paper establishes a unified analysis of the left periphery in the Igbo clause.