The Basic Clause Structure in Idoma
Keywords:
Idoma, English, basic clauseAbstract
This paper is a description of the structure of the basic clause in Idoma. Though not a contrastive study, the paper juxtaposes constituents of the basic clause in English and Idoma to ascertain those structures that will constitute difficulty for Idoma learners.
Adopting the transformational generative grammar approach (Chomsky 1981) as adopted by Yusuf (1997) and Lamidi (2000) as its theoretical framework, it analyses data collated from native speakers and the intuition and introspection of the author. The paper describes the constituents of the basic clause in the two languages and predicts likely problem areas for Idoma learners of English. These include variable object position in Idoma clause structure, dual function of tense and agreement particles and other grammatical words. Though there is a rising interest in describing aspects of Idoma grammar, such studies are just emerging. Therefore, the significance of this paper lies in the fact that apart from contributing to the syntactic studies on African languages, it provides data from a language on which literature on her syntactic processes is quite scanty.
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