A CONTRASTIVE SYNTACTIC STUDY OF THE SENTENCE STRUCTURES OF ENGLISH AND IGALA

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Department of Arts

The research, entitled “A Contrastive Syntactic Study of the Sentence Structures of English and Igala” was undertaken as a contribution towards the development of contemporary Igala grammar. The work entailed looking at various constructions in Igala against similar constructions in English. The structural theory as employed by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartik (1985) was adopted as the theoretical framework. Using data from recordings, native speakers intuition, informal conversation and books written in Igala, the research findingshighlighted some characteristics of the sentence structures in Igala that were peculiar to the language including the noun preceding articles and adjectives when the subject is a combination of both. For verbs, Igala lacks morphological inflections as used in English. The past form of the simple or habitual tense is formed by removing an auxiliary verb „a‟ instead of simply adding „d‟ or „ed‟ as done in English. The verb „be‟ as found in English with all its different forms does not exist in Igala but replaced by verbs that perform other duties such as „de‟ and „che‟ the verb „fu‟ is use as auxiliary to express the verb „have‟ in all situations. While English maintains a „svo‟ pattern, Igala has both „svo‟ and „sov‟ structures. Also, in the „svo‟ sentence structures in Igala, the direct object precedes the indirect but always connected by a preposition „to‟ or „for‟ (ng). For compound sentence, it was discovered that Igala uses different words on particles for the conjunctions „and‟ (ngo, lango) and „but‟ (Muda, amaa) and for the complex sentence structures the subordinators in Igala are fewer than those of English as one can be used to express more than one different subordinate clauses. In conclusion, the findings of the study highlighted several areas of the organization of the utterances in the language thus proving that Igala was capable of using a high degree of complexities in the sentence structures to express complete ideas just as in English and other languages.