IDEAL INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

This study investigates WH-constructions in the Nteje dialect of Igbo, a speech variety spoken in Anambra State, Nigeria. Wh-constructions, which are interrogative structures involving WH-words such as g?n? ‘what’, òlee ‘which’, and ked? ‘how’, are central to the syntaxsemantics interface of Igbo and other Benue-Congo languages (Manfredi, 1993; Uwalaka, 1995). While Standard Igbo Wh-questions have received extensive attention in generative syntax and descriptive linguistics (Nwachukwu, 1987; Uchechukwu, 2008), dialectal variation, particularly in Nteje, remains underexplored. This study fills that gap by offering a descriptive and theoretical account of how Wh-elements are formed, positioned, and interpreted in the dialect.Data were elicited through structured interviews, oral narratives, and spontaneous speech recordings from native speakers of Nteje. The analysis is framed within the Lexical- Functional Grammar and Minimalist Program perspectives, which account for both surface variation and deep structural constraints (Chomsky, 1995; Bresnan, 2001). Findings reveal that Nteje dialect permits both ex-situ Wh-movement (fronting of WHphrases) and in-situWh-constructions, with the choice influenced by discourse-pragmatic factors such as focus and emphasis. For instance, while ex-situ constructions are preferred for contrastive focus, in-situ Wh-forms are frequently used in casual speech for information-seeking purposes, echoing patterns reported in Standard Igbo (Nwachukwu, 1995; Amaechi & Georgi, 2021). Additionally, the study shows that Nteje Whconstructions display unique morpho-syntactic features, such as the retention of dialect-specific Wh-forms, the optionality of focus markers (ka), and prosodic strategies that distinguish echo-questions from genuine information-seeking questions. The study concludes that Wh-constructions in the Nteje dialect are both structurally and pragmatically versatile, reflecting the dialect’s dynamic interaction between syntactic constraints and communicative needs. Beyond contributing to Igbo dialectology, the findings have implications for general theories of Wh-movement, focus marking, and typological variation in question formation across Niger-Congo languages

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