ABSTRACT

This study aims at contrasting the nouns and verbs inflectional processes of English and C‟Lela languages with teaching implication in details to pinpoint any similarities and differences between them. To do the contrastive analysis, descriptive design was used to describe the elements of contrast in the study.4000 nouns and 4000 verbs were taken as the population for the study because the universe is heterogeneous and infinitive. Stratified sampling technique was used in arriving at the sample size of 50 nouns and 50 verbs marking a total of 100 words. The instruments used in collecting data for the study are some nouns and verbs.Four research questions are answered to achieve the objectives of the study.An inventory of nouns and verbs inflectional processes of English and C‟Lelalanguages are listed to highlight their similarities and differences. Result revealed that, there are restricted numbers of inflectional processes in each language and are used to indicate aspects of grammatical function of a word. Result reveals that there are more varieties of inflectional processes in C‟Lela language than in English language. It also reveals that they shared some properties as well as dissimilarities. English represents more irregularities in terms of plurality for nouns and affixation for verbs. C‟Lela language exhibitsdistinct plural markers for animate and inanimate nouns. The differences are the major source of difficulties for a native speaker of C‟Lela language to learn English language and vice versa, to overcome this, teaching should be effectively and efficiently managed at these different points to smooth the path for learners. Based on the findings of this study, some implications can be drawn for textbook writers, syllabus designers, learners and instructors involve in language pedagogy. Based on the findings the following recommendations were made: teachers should pay more attention to areas that exhibit points of differences, students should be taught the inflectional processes of the second language in differentiation from the first language, textbook writers should include in their text, the items identified as different and allocate more exercises and practice time during teaching and learning and curriculum designers should include the items identified as problems/difficult to the second language learner in the syllabus and allocate enough time for proper treatment of the items.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

The history of comparative linguistics has had the wheel of fortune characterized by being exhaustively examined by Fisiak, (1981), Granger,(2003) and Paradowski,(2007).Its validity and usefulness for language pedagogyhas been identified. Structural linguists, the pattern practice theorists and language teachers have derived insight and justification for their work from such approaches to linguistic descriptions. Nothing seems of greater value and potential to language teachers and learners than a comparative and contrastive description of the learner‟s mother tongue (MT) and the target language (TL). According to James, (1980: iii),“If the structure of the mother tongue could be juxtaposed against that of the target language, course designers, teachers and learners would be better able to foresee difficulties and consequently better able to husband resources and direct learning and teaching effort”.Contrasting the lexical items of the vocabulary of different languages is a well recognized and acceptable fact in linguistics. It helps to ascertain areas of similarities and difference between the two languages.(SIL2004, Aronoff and
Fudeman, 2011:45) defines inflection “as the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, voice, aspects, person number, gender and case”. Bloomfield (1993:222) sees inflection as “the outer layer of the morphology of word form”. Tomori (1977:33) sees, “inflection as morphemes that perform grammatical function in a word without changing the word class of such word”. In other words, inflections are added when all derivational and compositional processes are already completed. The plural of “book” is “books” and “baby” is “babies”. Inflectional variations are signaled by the presence of inflectional suffixes on the verb, noun and adjective and it does not form a new word….