Verbs of Cooking and Washing in Urhobo

Abstract

Cooking and washing as essential parts of human activities showcase both the language and the culture of a people. It represents features such as socialisation, identity, actions and perception of a people. This paper explored the nature of cookery terms through the lexical field analysis of the generic verbs of cooking and washing in Urhobo. Invoked in this study is a notion of semantic field as the theoretical framework. The research design adopted for this research is qualitative research. In the design, the quality of cooking stuff and the degree of heat application or none and the instruments of cooking combined to form the delimiting frame for the cooking types and the types of verbs use. The research is limited to verbs of cooking and washing that pertain to cooking such as washing of fish, meat, plates and other cooking utensils. Using a total of 50 questionnaires distributed equally among native speakers of Urhobo, the study collected data from adult speakers of the language. The data generated were subjected to semantic and syntactic examination to reveal the meaning of the vocabularies in their structure respectively. The difference and relationship of the terms are also investigated using hyponyms. It is observed that such hyponyms are determined based on a particular type of food and the process or pattern of the cooking involved. The study reveals how verbs of cooking and washing varies in Urhobo due to types, quality and degree of cooking and washing. The study reveals how the verbs variables make distinction in their lexical field when it comes to cooking and washing terms.

Keywords: Verbs in Urhobo, cooking and washing