A Contrastive Analysis of Sentence and Clause Patterns in Lokaa and English

Abstract

Language, mankind’s most versatile instrument for effective communication, is a major feature of differentiation between nations and peoples and its study has remained one of the earliest, most persistent and most prevalent areas of interest for scholars. This study is a contrastive examination of the sentence and clause patterns of English and Lokaa, one of the languages of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in the south east of Nigeria. It is aimed at highlighting the similarities and differences in order determine the implications for the Okurr speakers of English as L2. The paper examines the word order in some sentence types in Lokaa and English using the TGG model and reveals that a simple negative statement in English takes the SVO pattern whereas that in Lokaa takes SOV and the determiner in a simple affirmative statement comes last, after the noun in the object position unlike what obtains in English.

Keywords: Lokaa, Okurr, Contrastive analysis, gerundive clause, simple affirmative and negative statements.