Hezekiah University Journal of Management & Social Sciences

THE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF NOMINAL GROUPS IN ENGLISH AND GOKANA LANGUAGES

CYRUS, SMART EZIWHO, BAKOR, TUKA SECOND

June 10, 2023

Citation

Hezekiah University Journal of Management & Social Sciences , Vol. 10 (2) (2023) , pp. 167-183

Details

ISSN: 979 -41323
Published: June 10, 2023
Status: Published

Abstract

This paper, Comparative Analysis of Nominal Groups in English and
Gokana Languages, adopts the descriptive approach and
Contrastive Analysis (CA) as its theoretical framework. The study
aims to analyze nominal groups in both languages English and
Gokana. Data sources include primary and secondary sources, as
well as from the researcher’s intuition as a native speaker of
Gokana and a competent user of English as a second language (L2). Data analysis was carried out using morpheme-to-morpheme
glossing and are presented in sentence forms. The findings reveal
that all nouns in Gokana begin with consonants and exhibit CV, CVC, and CVCV syllable structures, whereas English nouns may begin with
either vowels or consonants and display varying syllable structures. The study further shows that count nouns can be preceded by
articles and pluralized in both languages. Additionally, the Gokana
suffixes -i and -a function as proximal and distal demonstratives
that change form in response to number contrasts, while Gokana
demonstratives remain invariable. Gokana nouns do not show
morphological contrast for number, as plurality is lexicalized. This
study contributes to the linguistic description of Gokana and English, serving as a reference for the Gokana and Ogoni communities and
as pedagogical material for teaching Gokana nominal groups.