{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.020177562550443905, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.595744680851064, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Morphosyntactic Analysis of Efik Proverbs

Proverbs are important aspects of verbal discourse within the socio-cultural contexts in which knowledge, ideas and emotions are communicated. They reflect the people‟s social and cultural orientations, philosophy, worldviews, as well as psychological and literary make-ups that generally depict the experience of life. The language of proverbs is commonly figurative, colourful, pithy, grammatically insightful and condensing the wisdom of experience. In this study, we attempt the morphological and syntactic description of proverbs in Efik, a Lower-Cross language spoken predominantly in Southern Cross River State, Nigeria. Proverbs are morphosyntactic constructions of different kinds, structures and functions, with their unique grammatical peculiarities. We investigate the internal structure of Efik proverbs and highlight their grammatical relevance in an attempt to accentuate an aspect of the Efik language and culture which is daily put out of prominence and active use, given that Efik proverbs mainly thrive in oral tradition. Our aim is to arrest the loss of this inherited knowledge and attempt to preserve a valuable part of the Efik linguistic, literary and cultural heritage.