A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PLURALISATION IN URHOBO AND ENGLISH

ABSTRACT

English language is an international language while the Urhobo language is a local one that is spoken in a part of Delta State of Nigeria. This thesis aims at a comparison of these two languages, but since nobody can claim a total or an absolute knowledge of a language, the concept of pluralisation is, therefore, chosen for comparison in the two languages. This research work, “A Comparative Analysis of Pluralisation in Urhobo and English,” is basically aimed at determining the possible similarities and dissimilarities in the manifestion of pluralisation in an international language and in a local Nigerian language. The theory of Universal grammar believes that all languages, no matter their composition and disposition, are not only structurally similar but also semantically equitable. This is the reason why this researcher looked at the meaning of the linguistic concept, pluralisation, in both the Urhobo and the English languages. The concept is well studied, defined and documented in the English language, but the reverse is the case in the Urhobo language. That does not, however, mean the absence of the concept in Urhobo. This is another reason why the researcher looked into the concept in Urhobo to find outhow it is manifested vis-a-vis its realisation in the English language. By so doing, the concept of pluralisation is compared in both languages. This comparison, therefore, created the background and data for the analysis of similarities and dissimilarities of pluralisation in Urhobo and English. To determine the similarities and dissimilarities of pluralisation in both languages, the researcher adapted the framework of Lado (1963:80). Lado suggestes that for effective comparative study of vocabulary of languages, the vocabulary be broken down into four parts. He assignes names to the four divisions, as follow: 1. Function words: These are words which signify questions, such as ‘ do’, ‘ how’, ‘ why’, ‘ when’, etc. 2. Substitute words: These are words which replace classes of words and several other subclasses, such as ‘ he’, ‘ she’, ‘ they’, etc. 3. Grammatically distributed words: Words that show grammatical restriction in distribution, such as ‘ some’, ‘ any’, ‘ many’, ‘ few’, etc. 4. Content words: This class has the bulk of the vocabulary of every language. These are words which can further be classified into 1 things’, ‘ places’, ‘ people’, ‘ processes’, ‘ qualitiess’, etc. But this resaearcher decided to assign more general names to the grouping above to facilitate his research work. In other words, Lado (1963) was adapted for this analysis. The “function words” were discarded because they were not relevant to this study. The “substitute words”, were given the traditional name PRONOUNS; “Grammatically distributed words” were named DETERMINERS; while “Content words”, became NOUNS. This was done bearing in mind that pluralisation is a nominal category in the Urhobo and English structures. After the analysis and comparative discussions on the data collected, the researcher concluded that there are functional and structural similarities in Urhobo and English plural systems, but structural and formal dissimilarities in the plural systems of both languages.