Analysis of the Noun Phrase in Ogba and English Languages

This work is a contrastive analysis of English and Ogba noun phrases. The aim of this study is to analyse, compare and contrast the noun phrases of English and Ogba languages. Its specific objectives are to: identify the head complement relationships in the noun phrases of English and Ogba, examine its constituents and compositions, and to examine the syntactic positions of the English and Ogba noun phrases. The study adopted the descriptive survey design. Data for this study were gathered through unstructured oral interview and library materials available in both languages. The researcher selected the respondents randomly. A contrastive analysis of the noun phrases in the two languages revealed that English has a complement initial and head final relationship while the head of an NP in Ogba language may occur at the initial or final position depending on the modifier that co-occurs with it. The head of an NP in Ogba occurs in the final position whenever it co-occurs with a quantifier with the exception of ‘only’, and ‘one’. In the constituent of the noun phrase, the study further revealed that English language has more modifiers of the noun phrase, while nominal modifiers in Ogba language are identified as: adjectives, demonstratives, pronominal modifiers, quantifiers and numerals. Also, it is observed that dative transformational rule is possible in English but not possible in ogba language. The study therefore concludes that there exist similarities and differences in the noun phrases of both languages. The study recommends that Linguists should be motivated to analyse their own languages in order to find out their areas of similarities and differences their languages have with the target language so as to facilitate the learning of a second language. Scholars in analysing language should pay attention to the rules that govern the combination of lexical categories to phrasal categories.