Syntactic Contrastive Analysis of Relative Clause Structures of The Yoruba and English Languages

Abstract

This study, “Syntactic Contrastive Analysis of Relative Clause Structures of Yoruba and English Languages”, investigates the nature, syntactic elements and structural formation of Yoruba and English Relative Clause structures. Though, there might be areas of similarities between two or more different languages, there are certainly no two languages that are the same. The data for the study were generated in Iwo and Ogbomoso towns from the different interactional activities of the native speakers of Yoruba language. This was done through interviews, recording and writing of the sentences/utterances from the conversations. The data were analysed descriptively using the Contrastive Analysis (CA) Theory propounded by Lado. The study shows that the relative clause marker; the “ti-clause” in the Yoruba language relative clauses is often immediately followed by a noun or pronoun – ‘o, won, a, etc’. This however depends on the headword and if the same is retained in English, it will result to syntactic disorder. The finding also reveals that Yoruba language does not distinguish between the two types of relative clauses: restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses, (RRCs NRRCs). Hence, the most typical areas of syntactic difficulty faced by the Yoruba users of English through the Contrastive Analysis Theory in relative clauses are: incorrect use of genitive relative pronoun, omission of relative pronoun, noun/pronoun retention, omission of prepositions in relative clauses, error in subject-verb agreement, omission of a main verb in relative clauses, incorrect use of verb phrase, omission of commas, and use of relative pronoun “that” in replacement of “who”, “which”, “whom”, “when”, “where” etc in relative clauses. In addition, the study shows that where English has several numbers of relative clause markers (relative pronouns), the relative clause of Yoruba language is only introduced with one relative clause marker - ‘ti-clause’. Through the data collected and analysed, the study concludes that there exists a certain level of divergence and convergence in the relative clauses of the two languages under study.