CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE MORPHO-PHONEMIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH AND IDOMA LANGUAGES

Abstract

Linguists generally have agreed that there exists an inevitable inter-relationship between different levels of linguistic analysis among which are: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Various linguistic labels are used in the description of such a link. In particular, there exists a bridge between the morphology and phonology-morpho-phonemics of English and Idoma languages. English and Idoma languages are of two different linguistic backgrounds. Idoma language falls among the category of minority languages in Nigeria that has not received any serious scholarly attention in the area of morpho-phonemics. Hence, it becomes necessary to examine a contrastive analysis of the morpho-phonemic features of English and Idoma languages. The aim of the study is to provide a contrastive analysis of the morpho-phonemic features of English and Idoma. The researcher however gathered the data for this study through oral interview among competent Idoma native speakers; the researcher equally used existing literature in English language as well as the researcher’s personal knowledge as a competent native speaker of Idoma language respectively. The study is anchored on Robert Lado’s Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis and Chomsky and Halle theory of Generative Phonology. However, the findings of the study review that: Idoma language unlike the English language (with forty-four) has thirty-two sounds/phonemes of which seven are vowels whereas twenty-five are consonant sounds; monosyllabic verbs in Idoma Language use infinitive prefix ‘o’ before the verb unlike the English language; Idoma nouns begin with vowel sounds only; inflectional endings (plural markers) and past tense marker in English and Idoma languages are quite different from each other  just like the English and Idoma syllabic structures; there is vowel hiatus resolution (omission/elision/deletion) in both Idoma and English languages. English and Idoma languages are different and similar to some extent in their word formations. From the findings of this study, the researcher cannot claim to have explored each and every aspect in the area of morpho-phonemics of English and Idoma languages, therefore recommends that other researches particularly on  Morpho-syntactic, morpho-semantics and many others be carried out to contrast English and Idoma languages.

1.1       Background to the Study

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

Language is one of the greatest gift of God to humanity. It is a means by which man expresses his ideas and gives meaning to his existence. Perhaps, the most significant and distinctive defining characteristics of language is that language is a means of communicating ideas, emotions, feelings, and desires through vocal sound symbols and its humanness and non- distinctiveness (Agbedo, 2003). Similarly, Ngonebu (2008:1) argues that “language is one of the most significant features of human kind. There is nothing human beings can do without the function of one form of language or the other. The fact that human beings exist and live together depend purely on the existence of language.” Language could be classified into phonetics and phonology; morphology; syntax; semantic; pragmatics and others. Though, in this study, the phonological and the morphological aspects of language was examined.

The term ‘morphology’ derives from the Greek word ‘morph’ which means form and

‘logy’ (study). In the words, the study of morphology according to Prasad simply means: “the study of form and the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words” (2014:48). It is one of the levels of linguistic analysis which involves the study of word formation or word structure. The process includes: affixation, compounding, and modification that involves several other morphological processes such as suppletion, vowel change, subtraction, conversion, clipping, hypocorism and blends.

In a related development, Morphology as captured by Ndimele (1999) is the study of the internal structure of words which is made-up of ‘morph’ meaning ‘shape, form’ and ‘logy’ which has to do with study. The term is used in both Linguistics and Biology but this study is done in the field of linguistics to represent the scientific study of form and structure of words in a language. Since morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, then, one needs

words in every aspect of one’s life as building blocks for the construction of sentences that will bring about a meaningful utterance among human beings.  Onuigbo and Eyisi (2009) add that morphology studies the structure of words of a language with special reference to the morphemes of that language.

Morphological awareness enables one to understand the structure of a language. This further gives one the ability to reflect upon and manipulate morphemes and control word formation processes in a language (Koda & Zehler, 2008). To Al Farsi (2008) morphological analysis is the ability of the learner to study the morphemes as well as the morphemic boundaries by disassembling difficult words into meaningful parts and  reassembling the meaningful parts into new meanings. The morpho-phonemic features of Idoma and the English languages  are  different  and  each  language  exhibits  distinctive  features  especially in  the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. This relationship is examined in some details. The study also examines the affixation processes in both languages. For instance, the word

‘kingdom’ can be analysed into two morphemes, “king” and “dom”.   New words, such as wisdom, boredom, random, martyrdom, chiefdom, and many others can be generated using the morpheme -dom.

It is important to acknowledge the relevance of the learner’s L1 in the study of morphological features of the target language. In this development, Hickey and Lewis (2013) posit that the very first step necessary to providing instruction on the morphological processes of students’ or the learner’s first language is to have a good knowledge of those morphological processes that are available in such learner’s native language. Knowing a bit about how students’ first languages work is necessary in examining the errors that may be encountered in learning the target language.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on the study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages (and therefore used to be also called phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning.

Many renowned phoneticians and philologists have defined phonology differently but it is evident from their definitions that their different viewpoints of the term remain the same. Phonology is said to be the sound structure of language; Crystal (1980) sees phonology as a branch of linguistics which studies the sounds of languages. Crystal (1980) further maintains that when we talk about the sound system of English, we are referring to the number of phonemes which are in a language and how they are organized. In the light of this, George (2009) posits phonology as:

Essentially the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a language. It is in effect based on a theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound patterns of that language. Because of this theoretical status, phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with actual physical articulation of speech sounds. . . that serves as the consonant basis of the variations in different physical articulation of the sound type in different context (154).

Similarly, Fromkin & Rodman (1998) state that “phonology refers both to linguistic knowledge that speakers have about the sound patterns of their language and to the description of that knowledge that linguistics try to produce” (256).

It is evident from the ongoing that phonology studies sounds in language and way in which they are combined to create meaning. It aims to describe the sounds (phoneme) that are distinctive in a language. It is also concerned with the system of rules (constraints) that

determine how the sounds of a language combines to influence one another. It emphasizes on the study of the way sounds function in a language, including phonemes, syllable structure, stress, accent and intonation. Therefore, it is appropriate to say that, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning.

Phonology as a linguistics concept has a symbiotic relationship with morphology. For any language to effectively function in producing meaningful utterance, morphology and phonology must be present. Phonology can also be seen as a sound system of a given language. This is one of the fundamental systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax and its vocabulary. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics. While phonetics concerns the physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages to encode meaning. The preoccupation of this study is however not to distinguish phonetics from phonology, but to examine the relationship that exist between the two umbrella disciplines (Carr, 2003 & Lass, 1998).

It is obvious that morphology and phonology can be interlinked and this can be done through allomorphy. In many languages, morphemes have different forms depending on the phonological environment. The traditional English example of this, is the plural morpheme. If the word ends in a voiceless stop the plural morpheme is -/s/ (e.g. [daks] ‘docks’, elsewhere it is -/z/ (e.g. /dagz/ ‘dogs’). The term allomorph is not only used for phonologically motivated morpheme alternations.

The interface or the relationship between morphology and phonology is very paramount to the study of any living language in the universe. Hence, the study of the phonemic realization of the allomorphs of the morphemes of a language is regarded as morphophonemic. Morphophonemic rule has the form of a phonological rule, but is restricted to a particular

morphological environment. Morpho-phonemic rules are sensitive to their environment, unlike phonological rules. Whenever morphological information is required to specify the environment      for      an      allophonic      rule,       the      rule      is      morphophonemic

(http://www.glossary.sil.org/term/morphophonemic-rule). For a meaningful study to be done

in morpho-phonemics, one must have a consolidated knowledge of letter or spelling and sound relationship. This relationships is treated in the following aub-section.

There is no doubt that where two different languages exist, similarities and differences a bound. The relationship between phonology and morphology is not just to merge the two disciplines- morphology and phonogy to form the third sub- discipline, morpho-phonemics, but to also identify how sounds blend with morphemes to create a morphemic environment. Idoma language is the first language of the researcher which he has linguistic compentence, whereas English is the second language of the researcher, so the knowedge of the English and Idoma languages is certain to affect the body of knowledge. This study engaged the sound and the word formation processes of the English and Idoma languages, and how they relate with each other to bring about morpho-phonemic changes in the two languages.

1.1.1    Contrastive Linguistics

The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition in linguistic scholarship. It reached its zenith in the development of Indo-European studies in the 19th century when languages were compared with a view to determining their exact genetic relationships in order to reconstruct the proto-language from which the attested languages of a family derived. Language educators at both the secondary and the tertiary Institutions and, indeed, at the primary school level are often confronted with pedagogical problems in the teaching of English. To many of the language teachers, these problems defy solution. Their knowledge of theoretical linguistics is never brought to bear on language teaching and learning. The teacher

has to teach English to students from diverse socio-linguistic backgrounds. To succeed as a language teacher, he needs to carry out comparative or contrastive studies of English and the native languages of his students (Olaoye, 2015). The teacher who has made a comparative study of the morphological systems of the second language (English) and the native language (Idoma) will know what the real learning problems of his students are and how to solve them. The issue of interlanguage and hence inter-lingual errors or even errors arising from interference can be tackled by contrastive analysis.

Contrastive study could however, be seen as a system whereby the features of two languages are compared and contrasted in order to bring out areas of similarities and differences in phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax and semantics (Al-Hassan, 2006). With the knowledge of the similarities and differences, predictions of the problem areas can easily be made for pedagogical adjustments. Comparative analysis is one of the oldest approaches to linguistic studies. This approach dates back to the early 19th Century when the comparison of the so called Indo-European languages (English, French, Germany, and Portuguese) and the Africans languages was made an integral part of the studies in Europe.  Linguists then were preoccupied essentially with the comparison of language features for the purpose of establishing language families.

1.1.2    The English Language in Nigeria

English language is at the centre of life and at the heart of the discourse in multi-lingual setting like Nigeria. It is in the light of this that Onuigbo (2006) maintains that “…English language has become a fact of life in Nigeria and many other countries of the world where the language is used as a second language…” (vii). Historically, English belongs to the Germanic branch of Language. (Lawrence, et al, XI). English was the native speech of about fifteen (15) million people in the 19th century. It is spoken in many countries of the world as official

language and the most widely studied language in none native domains. The use of English is widespread in international trade, scholarship, scientific researches and discoveries, military, religious worships and marriages. The most remarkable fact is that more than half of the world academic and non-academic journals as well as newspapers are printed in English. Most of the world’s messages are written in English and the majority of the world’s radio and television stations use English in their broadcast. English language is rated in the multilingual nation, Nigeria, with about five hundred and ten living languages as an indispensable, prestigious and official language of education, politics, judiciary, legislature, commerce and journalism. (Sofunke, 2004).

The vocabulary of English is on the increase because of its methods of word-formation. Words are derived in English through borrowing from other languages; compounding; addition of affixes; functional shift and imitations of sounds, (Lawrence, et al, 1982). In Nigeria, English is the official language and language of commerce and industry. English is used at all levels of education in Nigeria. Sofunke (2004:34) suggests that the “needs of international viability in the modern world, among others support the adoption of English as the official national language”.

English language is arguably one of the most valuable assets left behind by Nigeria’s colonial master as a result of the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic nature of Nigeria and for administrative purpose, the English language has been adopted as the second language. The role of English language in a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic country Nigeria has been one of integration and the utilitarian use of the language for inter-ethnic communication, for politics and administration and as a medium of institution in education and mass communication cannot be over emphasized. For decades English has remained the language of government, law, administration politics, mass media, commerce and all sorts of social engagement for people from different language groups in Nigeria. It is the language of education and medium of

instruction in school (Ajulo; Kolawole, and Oyedokun- Alli, qtd. in Ogundepo, 2015). Adeyanju (2002) states that English language in Nigeria has for long championed the course of human co-operation by performing effectively the above mentioned roles. All these show that the English language has pre-eminence in Nigeria more than any other Nigeria language. In fact it is the official language of Nigeria.

In view of the importance attached to English, an average Nigerian is expected to have more than just a working knowledge of the language. To fulfil one’s roles effectively in the society, one needs a good knowledge of the language. It has become so important that one cannot avoid speaking and writing it in a way that meets the required general minimum intelligibility. This presupposes that an appreciable degree of competence is expected from the learners of English at both secondary and tertiary levels of education.

1.1.5    Idoma Language

The history of the Idoma people precedes the history of Benue State (created 1976) and the history of the Republic of Nigeria (created 1960). Idoma people are found in the Southern part of Benue State with a population of about 2.5 million. They held sway in nine local government areas of the state. “It is made up of a territorial unit defined approximately by a parallelogram whose broad limits extended Doma and Keena in the North to Igbo land in the South. It also extends from Idah in the West to as far as Wukari in the East.

The Idoma are a homogenous ethnic group with dialectical differences indicated by some distinct speech forms of people in Otukpo, Adoka and Ugboju; Edumoga in contrast to Agila, Otukpa, Orokam, Agatu among others. Despite the dialectal difference, the Idoma people speak the same Idoma language. Linguistic evidence suggests that the Idoma have lived in their present day region for at least five thousand years, and that they probably moved into

the area from the north along with the forbearers of Yoruba, Bini, and Igbo peoples. All these people belong to the Kwa group of languages.

Oral tradition is the primary method through which history has been passed in Idoma land and is considered a central cultural institution. From a young age, Idoma children usually learn from their elders’ stories of old and are brought up around extended families, which make multiple historical resources available. Many Idoma groups and village have their own histories complete with stories about how their people arrived at their current location (Abah; Gbaaikyo

& Omadachi, 2015).

1.2       Statement of the Problem

Idoma language is one of the minority languages in Nigeria, but one of the major languages in Benue State of Nigeria. Unfortunately, Idoma happens to be one of the languages in Nigeria and indeed Africa which is left behind in terms of language development and standardization. This scenario has hindered effective implementation of language policy formulation and language planning efforts in the Idoma speaking area of Benue State.  The dearth of in-depth descriptions of Idoma language has been a serious and a major source of concern to all the stakeholders in the education sector in Benue State, particularly the Idoma extraction. There is no level of education within Benue State or outside the state where Idoma language is taught or used as a language of instruction. The language has not been developed at all linguistic levels.Though, few studies have been done in the areas of Phonology, Syntax, Morphology and Orthography, but the Morpho-phonemics of the language has not enjoyed any serious scholarly attention.

At this point, it is important to note that many researches have been carried out to examine the similarities and difference between the structures of English and some Nigerian languages especially in the areas of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, semantics,

morpho-phonemics, morpho-syntactic and many others. However, not much has been done to contrast English and Idoma languages. Every language of the world has its own pattern of word and sound formation and relationships; English and Idoma are two distinct languages each with peculiar linguistic structures. It is obvious that the structural differences between English and Idoma morpho-phonemic structures create problems for the teaching and learning of English. It is against this backdrop that this research is designed to show the similarities and differences between the two languages as well as the implications which the linguistic differences may have on the teaching and learning of English as a second language. It is usual to experience problems because of inflectional and word formation processes, allomorphs and many other structural  features  of the two  languages  which  are not  always  the same. Therefore,  the contrastive analysis of English and Idoma morpho-phonemic patterns provide significant pedagogical benefit to the Idoma learners of English as a second language. Since there is no detailed scholarly work in this direction, this research is set to fill this vacuum.

1.3       Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of this study is to carry out a contrastive analysis of the morpho-phonemic features of English and Idoma languages. Specifically, the study seeks to:

i.         To establish the morpho-phonemic features of English language;

ii.        To identify the morpho-phonemic features of Idoma language and,

iii.        To  examine  the  similarities  and  the  differences  between  the  English  and  Idoma languages morpho-phonemic features.

1.4       Significance of the Study

Linguists are currently concerned about the question of language extinction or dying languages. Idoma is a language that requires to be studied, analysed and documented. This

work, generally adds to information on languages in the world, Africa, Nigeria and specifically on Idoma as a dynamic and changing language. The cardinal pre-occupation of this study is to contribute to the current trends in scholarship in this field. The study, therefore, would serve as a reference material to subsequent studies in English and Idoma morphological and phonological structures. The study would also provide a framework for analysis of sound and word-formation processes in English and Idoma languages. It would contribute to the understanding of morphemes, phoneme, word distinctions and meanings. Hence, the findings of this study shall provoke further researches of wider dimension in related fields in other Nigerian languages. In all, the study among others will show the morpho-phonemic similarities and difference between English and Idoma languages and establish how morphological and phonological processes differ in many languages and of course project contrastive analysis and generative phonology as a reliable theoretical framework for such studies.

The process of comparing two languages at any linguistic level could be tedious, but the outcome thereof could be quite beneficial. Hence, it can go a long way in complementing existing materials which, more often than not, are inadequate for academic purposes. Thus, a contrastive study of word formation processes between English and Idoma languages will contribute immensely to the study of language as a communicative tool in a society like Nigeria and the world at large. This study confirm or disprove some assumptions in previous studies on morphology and in addition contribute to the existing literature on the study of contrastive linguistics and applied linguistics. Again, it is hoped that this research will serve as an asset for further investigations and serve as an important reference document in libraries for other scholars who would like to do researches in comparative or contrastive studies. Educationists, curriculum planners, language developers and theorists will benefit from the study, and, incorporate  the  knowledge  gained  in  propounding theories  that  can  be  applied  in  these languages and others in formal school system.

1.5       Scope of the Study

The central concern of this study falls within the area of morphology and phonology. This research specifically cover the structural patterns of word-formation processes and phonology in English and Idoma languages respectively. Hence, for ease of exposition and comparison, the study is limited to the major word formation and phonological processes that are similar and different in the two languages. The decision to limit this study to morpho- phonology is so as to give an in-depth analysis of the language. The study is synchronic and descriptive in nature and examines the language as it is spoken.

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