A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WORD – FORMATION PROCESSES IN ENGLISH AND HAUSA (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
ABSTRACT
This study is a research on the topic: “A Comparative Analysis of Word formation Processes in English and Hausa”. This work aims to serve as a reference material to subsequent studies in English and Hausa languages in their various components of linguistic structures. It would also provide a framework for the study and analysis of the word-formation processes in English and Hausa. The study would also add to the research findings and meta-theory in linguistics thus, contributing to the current trend of intellectualism from the point of view of language. The work also attempts to enumerate and compare some of the word-formation processes in English and Hausa, such as acronyms, affixation, alternation, backformation, blending, borrowing, clipping, coinage, compounding, and reduplication. A sample descriptive approach was employed in the analysis of the data collected for this research. Thus, the procedure followed is a synthesis of the analytical comparative model of Nida (1949) and the stages of linguistic analysis of Carl (1996). Therefore, some of the research findings are that English and Hausa use some processes to create some words; that affixation is one of the processes found in both English and Hausa; that some of the processes discussed here could be found in one and not in the other
language, etc. Finally, it contains brief conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1:1 CONCEPTUAL PREMISE
The work is an attempt to compare the word – formation processes in two languages: English and Hausa. This chapter, therefore, attempts an introduction of the work. Thus, it contains the background of the study, the nature of morpheme, the historical perspective of the Hausa language, the statement of the research problem, the aims of the study, the justification of the study and the scope of the study.
The twentieth century is very important in the history of linguistics. This is because many linguistic theories came to the lime-light and many linguists initiated many theories in different fields of linguistics, which are morphology, syntax, semantics and phonology. For instance, it was at this period that in morphology the different approaches to identify morphemes and the relationship between morphemes and words were made manifest. The free encyclopedia (2008) is of the view that words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax. It is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word-formation in English. They sense that dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speakers reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the
way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and formulates rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. This work, therefore, is an attempt to compare the word-formation processes in two languages: English and
Hausa.
