A Contrastive Analysis of some Structures of English and Ẹdo Languages

This paper examines the Noun Phrases (NP‟s), Verb Phrases (VP‟s) and some simple sentences within Edo constructions in comparism to their structures in English language through a syntactic contractive analysis of the two languages. This study aimed at helping the Edo second language (L2) speaker overcome the problems of transfer from his (first language or mother tongue) L1 and to become more competent in the use of English structures. Chomsky‟s ST (Standard Theory) model was used as it accounts for phrase structure rules and transformational subcomponents. It has helped the researcher to highlight the major differences between the two languages within the phrase structure. It was discovered that the Edo structures are not as elaborate as that of English and that the Edo speaker of L2 is likely to omit the determiner and mix up his tenses because of their verb usage. The work concluded that there is a need for language teachers to draw the attention of the students to the areas of differences and spend more time to teach the students the correct usage so that the students can become more skilful in the use of the two languages.