A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF THE PAST TENSE INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES OF ENGLISH AND YORUBA

Abstract

This paper explores the past tense inflectional morphemes of English
and Yoruba to identify the morphological and syntactic structural
differences therein. It hinges on the Contrastive Analysis (CA) theory
and the qualitative descriptive design while engaging the content
analysis methodology, where data are analysed through the language
samples of the two languages concerned. From this study, it was
discovered that while English indicates the past tense of regular verbs
with the marker ‘-ed’, Yoruba on the other hand, employs the main
verbs in the language that denotes either the present or past such as
“gbe” (carries/carried), “tà” (sell/sold), “jẹ” (eats/ate), “mu”
(drink/drank) and the like, depending on the context of usage. This
paper also revealed that while the regular past tense inflectional
morpheme of English is a suffix and bound, the main verbs in Yoruba
are equally suffixes but free morphemes which are lexicalized to denote
past actions. In addition, English in its grammatical rules, contains
some exceptions or irregularities that do not conform to the regular
pattern (irregular verbs, using suppletive, replacive and zero
morphemes), and which may further pose some difficulties to the
second language learner. The study therefore recommends that second
language learners whose first language is Yoruba should safeguard
appropriate erudition and attainment of the right construction and
treatment of the past tense inflectional markers of English as they are,
to develop their expertise in the language.